Eric Herschthal holds a PhD in history and a masters in journalism, both from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton. His first book, “The Science of Antislavery” (forthcoming Yale UP) explores the role scientists played in the trans-Atlantic antislavery movement. His scholarship examines how elite abolitionists used scientific ideas to delegitimize slaveholders, contributing to a false narrative still prominent today that holds that slavery was a backward institution at odds with modernity. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and has written about race and slavery for The New York  Times, The New Republic,  Slate and The New York Review of Books.