Sail250® Virginia Speaker Series Presents

Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander is the Endowed Professor of Virginia Black History and Culture and emeritus director of the Joseph Jenkins Roberts Center for African Diaspora Studies at Norfolk State University.

Her books include: Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad (2017) and An African American History of the Civil War in Hampton Roads (2010). She has also co-authored the books: Black American Series: Portsmouth (2003), Hampton Roads: Remembering Our Schools (2009), and co-edited Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy (2008). 

She has contributed articles and chapters to numerous publications, including Dr. Timothy Walker’s book, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. She has also contributed to numerous programs, including those on the History Channel, BBC, and C-Span.

Dr. Newby-Alexander is the Vice Chairman of the Sai250® Virginia Executive Board of Directors, has served on the board of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, and was co-chair of the Virginia Commission on African American History Education in the Commonwealth.

Dr. Cheryl LaRoche is an associate research professor in Historic Preservation at the School of Architecture at The University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses on 18th and 19th-century free Black communities, their churches and institutions, and their relationship to the Underground Railroad. 

Dr. LaRoche’s work is multi-faceted, focusing on elements of law, history, oral history, archaeology, geography, and material culture to define 19th-century African American cultural landscapes and their relationship to freedom seekers’ escapes from slavery.

Dr. LaRoche is the author of Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (2013) and Apostle of Liberation: AME Bishop Paul Quinn and the Underground Railroad (2025). She is the recipient of the Maryland Historical Trust’s Calvert Prize for her work in historical preservation and the Society of Historical Archaeology’s John L. Cotter Award for her multidisciplinary approach to the study of African American archaeology.

Dr. LaRoche has been a consultant for the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Forest Service, Boston and Nantucket’s African Meeting Houses, and has served as archaeological conservator for the African Burial Ground Project in New York City.

Dr. Timothy Walker is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he teaches on Early Modern Europe, the Atlantic World, Portugal and its empire, maritime history, and European global colonial expansion.

Dr. Walker is the editor of multiple books, including Essays on Some Maladies of Angola, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad, and The Captain’s Coup: Activist Journalism on the Portuguese Revolution. 

Working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dr. Walker has also collected detailed historical weather data from the logs of 19th-century whaling vessels to provide comparisons with modern weather data and better understand long-term climate change.

Dr. Walker was the recipient of a Fulbright dissertation fellowship to Portugal (1996-1997), received the Boston University Humanities Foundation Award (1998), and has received numerous fellowships for research at Mystic Seaport, Mount Vernon, and fellowships to research in Portugal and India.