Tuesday, March 14th 2023, historian Keri Leigh Merritt returns to This is Hell! to discuss her co-editing of the collection, "After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America."

Keri Leigh was a guest on the show back in 2017 to discuss a book that was selected as one of our listeners favorites of the year, "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South."

Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian, editor and an independent scholar. She earned her B.A. from Emory University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association, honoring the best book in Southern economic or business history published in the previous two years, as well as the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association.

Merritt is also co-editor, with Matthew Hild, of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University Press of Florida, 2018), which won the 2019 Best Book Award from the UALE (United Association for Labor Education). She is currently working on two book-length projects for trade presses. Merritt also writes for the public, and has had letters and essays published in a variety of outlets. Most recently she released a self-narrated audiobook version of Masterless Men, and launched her history-based YouTube Channel “Merrittocracy.”

Image: May 3, 2020: Artist ESPO painted the boarded up storefronts in SOHO during the 2019 coronavirus pandemic

Wil540 art, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons