Marcella Schute (1996) is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History at Leiden University and at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) in Middelburg. Her PhD project explores the overt and covert efforts by the state of Louisiana to reopen the transatlantic slave trade in the 1850s. Marcella completed her MA in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam in 2020 and received her BA Cum Laude in Liberal Arts & Sciences from University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University) in 2019.