Yoav Hamdani holds a Ph. D from the History Department of Columbia University. His current research investigates the origins and scope of slavery within the U.S. Army, the legal, fiscal, and violent mechanisms that sustained it, and the profound impact slavery had on the American military establishment.

By creating multiple datasets, refining the metadata through machine learning, visualizing, mapping in GIS, and employing statistical models – the research presents a macro analysis of military enslavement and the fiscal and violent federal mechanism that sustained it. Additionally, he uses NLP, text mining, and visualization programs to identify information specific to military slavery from thousands of officers’ personal papers to understand the social and cultural history of military enslavement. Eventually, he will make the data accessible to the public.