Bianca Dang is the Donald W. Logan Family Endowed Chair of American History at the University of Washington in Seattle. Trained as a historian of the African Diaspora, she is currently working on her first manuscript which is a study of freedom-making practices in Haiti and the United States from 1780 to 1880. 

Her book manuscript chronicles how freed Africans and Afro-descended people in Haiti and the United States engaged in the process of freedom-making across a century. This project follows the lives and labors of everyday Haitians and African Americans as they navigated, negotiated, and refused the attempts of outside authorities to designate how freedpeople must live out their freedom. It demonstrates why freedpeople understood their identity as a “free person” as encompassing much more than a change to their previous legal status, one that had both designated their enslavement and had given others total control over them.