Margaret Vandiver is a retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Memphis. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in criminology from Florida State University. She has studied state and collective violence, ranging from the use of the death penalty in America to contemporary instances of genocide. She is the author of Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South and volunteers as a researcher for the Lynching Sites Project here in Memphis, Tennessee.