Angela Sutton is an Assistant Research Professor at Vanderbilt University, where she has taught a variety of history courses including Seapower in History, The Golden Age of Piracy, and Comparative Slavery. She is Director of the Fort Negley Descendants Project, an oral history archive of the descendants of the enslaved who built and defended a Civil War fortress in Nashville on the UNESCO Slave Route.

A native German speaker who has studied 17th-century Dutch language and paleography with the Dutch governing body of language at Columbia University, Sutton is able to read and translate new primary sources almost entirely inaccessible to American historians. In 2010, she received a Fulbright research grant to the Netherlands for research in the Dutch National Archives and Royal Library in The Hague, the basis of which formed her dissertation and this book.

Sutton has published articles with academic journals including The Historical Journal, the Afro-Hispanic Review, Archipelagos, and Slavery & Abolition. She currently serves as subject expert & consultant for various history-related multimedia projects, most recently a documentary podcast for BBC Radio 4 on ghosts of slavery (A Natural History of Ghosts: The Whitewashed Ghost), a historical documentary produced by Joseph Hill on the United States Colored Troops, and an upcoming podcast segment on Southern history & memory with the NEH-funded Oxford American's Points South.