Rhondda Robinson Thomas is an associate professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches early African American literature and American literature. She has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1770-1903, co-edited the anthology titled The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought, A Reader, and edited the scholarly edition of Jane Edna Hunter’s autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer. Dr. Thomas is currently conducting research for an essay and essay collection to be published by Cambridge University Press that examine literature produced by and about writers of African descent in the early American eras.  Dr. Thomas has been awarded a $150,000 grant for her research project Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History, which document the lives, labors, and/or contributions of six generations of African Americans—slaves, sharecroppers, convicts, wage workers, musicians, as well as students, faculty, and staff—associated with the institution, and is creating a traveling museum exhibit, Black Clemson: From Enslavement to Integration, based on research conducted for Call My Name. She also led a successful initiative for the installation of three new historical markers on the Clemson campus that help document the story of Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who once lived and labored on the land and is a member of the Clemson University History Implementation Team that is creating the master plan for historical commemoration at the institution.