Sarah Burns (Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Professor Emeritus of Art History, Indiana University, Bloomington. Her publications include Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (1996), Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2004), and The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends (2021). She has also authored numerous essays and articles on American art and artists in journals and exhibition catalogues. She is always happiest when thinking and writing about anything pertaining to Winslow Homer, her number one, all-time great nineteenth-century American painter.

GySgt Thomas Williams, a former U.S. Marine Corps Drill Instructor, Firefighter, and veteran of the Vietnam War and numerous Marine Corps deployments, has spent his life in military and public service, teaching, and historical education, contributing over fifty years of service and support to the Marine Corps and the American people. GySgt Williams is the Director of the United States Marine Corps Historical Company and has become one of the principal specialists in Marine Corps material culture. He has worked with such agencies as the National Park Service, the United States Marine Corps History and Museums Division, the United States Army Center of Military History, The United States Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and numerous National Trust and State Park sites, as well as the film industry.

Jason Patterson is an African American history based artist working in portraiture, the recreation of historical documents, and the designing and fabrication of stylized frames to house his work. Patterson lives and works in Chestertown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he works with students at Washington College, advising art students as well as students within the college’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. His current work is focused on the Black history of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and has been supported by Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project.