Talitha L. LeFlouria is an associate professor of history and the Mastin Gentry White Fellow in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which won awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Association of Black Women Historians, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, among others. 

Dr. LeFlouria received her PhD in US history from Howard University in Washington, DC, and has held positions with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Washington, DC, the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (National Park Service), Florida Atlantic University, and the University of Virginia. She is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the history of Black women, mass incarceration, and the legacies of American slavery. She has made guest appearances on NPR and C-SPAN, and in documentaries including One Thousand Years of Slavery, produced by Angela Bassett and Courtney Vance for the Smithsonian Channel. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vox, The Root, and Ms. and she has received numerous awards for her research, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block is her second single-authored book.