Simon P. Newman is emeritus professor of history at the University of Glasgow and is currently a research fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic. He helped create the graphic novel Freedom Bound: Escaping Slavery in Scotland.

Freedom Seekers reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in 17th-century London. It was the joint winner of the prestigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition in 2023. The judges wrote: 'Freedom Seekers is a powerful testimony to people's desire for liberty and control over their lives.'