Taneil Ruffin (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and a certificate student in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is interested in the histories of slavery and emancipations across the African diaspora. Her dissertation project brings together African diaspora history and legal history to explore how free and freed people of African descent in Louisiana navigated their liminal legal status between slave and citizen in the period between the Age of Revolutions and the Civil War era. The project sheds light on how people of African descent engaged law as they struggled against the legal vestiges of slavery and the racism they experienced in their daily lives. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Taneil received an M.A. in History and Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a B.A. in History from Brown University. She has also worked on several community-engaged public history projects in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Springfield, Massachusetts.