Linda M. Heywood is Professor of African American Studies and History at Boston University. She is also W.E.B. DuBois Fellow at Harvard University and formerly a Whiting Fellow at Columbia University as well as Profssor of History at Howard University and Cleveland State University. She is the author of Contested Power in Angola (1999) and editor of Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (2001). Professor Heywood has published in the Journal of African History, Journal of Modern African Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Slavery and Abolition.