Calvin Schermerhorn is a historian of slavery, capitalism, and the United States. He is Professor of History in Arizona State University's School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, where he teaches American and world history. He has published several books and articles on slavery, capitalism, and African America. His new book Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) gives a thematic overview of African American slavery from the Revolution to Reconstruction. He is the author of The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize awarded by the Lapidus and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and was published by Yale University Press. Previous books include Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and Henry Goings, Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery, co-edited with Mike Plunkett and Edward Gaynor (University of Virginia Press, 2012). 

He joined the faculty of Arizona State University in 2008 after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before that he worked in marketing and family support on an Air Force base. He has also earned a Master's from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His research has been funded by fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian, Huntington Library, Gilder Lehrman Center, American Philosophical Society, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, among other organizations, and he is on the speaker's bureau of Historians Against Slavery.