Ismael Montana is Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on slavery, abolition, and the development of Black African diasporic communities in Ottoman North Africa and the western Mediterranean. His scholarship has significantly advanced understanding of slavery’s legacies in North Africa and the Mediterranean Islamic world. He is the author of The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia and Blacks of Tunis in al-Timbuktāwī's Hatk al-Sitr, works that have deepened scholarly engagement with race, enslavement, religion, and African diasporic histories in the Islamic world. His current research includes a major monograph on slavery, West Africa, and the making of the African diaspora in the Middle East and North Africa, alongside digital humanities research using historical data to study enslaved populations in nineteenth-century Tunisia.

Montana is also Principal Investigator of the The Tax (Majba) Fiscal Registers (Tunisia) project at Walk With Web, where he leads a digital humanities initiative focused on opening new pathways for research through historical records and digital methods. In addition to his research and project leadership, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Slavery and is Immediate Past Board President of the West Africa Research Association, supporting scholarship on West Africa and its diaspora while fostering international academic collaboration.