Samantha Payne is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States in a global perspective, with a special focus on Latin America. She received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 2022. She is currently working on her first book, Atlantic Reconstruction (under contract with University of North Carolina Press), which explores the transnational struggle over the boundaries of Black political citizenship in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, the last societies to abolish slavery in the Americas.