Alice Baumgartner received her PhD in history from Yale University in 2018. Her book project, Abolition from the South: Mexico and the Road to the U.S. Civil War, 1800-1867, uses the story of American slaves who escaped to Mexico during the nineteenth century as a lens for understanding Mexico’s rise as an anti-slavery republic and its overlooked significance to the United States. Baumgartner received a BA in History from Yale University and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Her March 2015 article in the Journal of American History, “‘The Line of Positive Safety’: Borders and Boundaries in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1848-1880,” won the Louis Pelzer Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Bolton-Cutter Prize from the Western History Association.