Marie Troppe has twenty years’ experience developing community-based learning programs in higher education and earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Maryland at College Park. Her dissertation, Black Benefactors and White Recipients: Counternarratives of Benevolence in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, points to significant connections between racialized benevolence in 19^th-century literature and in 21^st-century efforts toward social activism. She most recently served as Director of Nexus and 21^st-Century Scholars at Mount Holyoke College where she taught a course on the Politics of Giving. She currently is doing research for the David Ruggles Center for Early Florence History and Underground Railroad Studies in Florence, Massachusetts.