April Masten is a Professor of American History at Stony Brook University, who specializes in the labor history of the arts. She has published work on Black-Irish challenge dancing, female visual artists, genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer, the overlooked contributions of artists’ models, the pitfalls of writing interdisciplinary history, and the joys of teaching history through dance. In 2021 and 2022, she won the AHA’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for her unique research seminar in which students learn to waltz, ring shout, swing, jig, and salsa to complement their archival study of the people, places, and periods that produced these dances. Her forthcoming book Diamond and Juba: The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing (University of Illinois Press, Fall 2025) is a dual biography of Irish-American John Diamond and African-American William Henry Lane, known as Juba, who made their livings and achieved international fame in the mid-nineteenth century as rival champions in the art and sport of challenge dancing.