Morgan Bettin-Coleman is a Ph.D. student who explores African American history. Her studies have spanned from the mid-19th century to mid-20th century, focusing mostly on the United States but also examining the broader Atlantic World. Contesting the Color Line: Law, Culture, and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana, her undergraduate thesis, centered on two white-passing enslaved women in New Orleans who sued for their whiteness and consequent freedom. That project looked at themes of identity, constructions and manifestations of race, racial ambiguity, racial passing, and gender. As her academic career progresses, she hopes to continue researching those concepts while also potentially exploring miscegenation, mixed-race identity, and changing interracial relations, studying the Atlantic world and African diaspora in more expansive ways.