Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian of the 19th c. American South. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2014 and works as an independent scholar in Atlanta. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, will be published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. Keri Leigh is also co-editing a collection of essays on southern labor history and has begun work on her second monograph, 1865: The Year of the First Black Power Movement. She regularly presents work at academic conferences, and has several speaking engagements planned for the upcoming year.