AAIHS OFFICERS

Executive Board

President–Keisha N. Blain

Keisha_Blain

Keisha N. Blain is a historian who writes on race, politics, and gender. She obtained a PhD in History from Princeton University. She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She served as the first senior editor of Black Perspectives from 2015 to 2019. Blain is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), which won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians. The book was also a finalist for the Hooks National Book Award and selected as one of the best books of 2018 by several outlets, including Smithsonian Magazine and BuzzFeed. Blain is also the co-editor of To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019); New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018); and Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016). Her work has been published in several academic journals such as the Journal of Social History and Souls; and popular outlets including Time, the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and The Feminist Wire. She is currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.

Vice President–Tyler D. Perry

Tyler Parry is an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. He serves in a number of capacities within the profession, including as an editor for H-Afro-Am and as Book Review Editor for Black Perspectives. His research examines slavery in the Americas, the African diaspora, and the historical memory of slavery in the United States. His first book, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) is the first definitive examination of the “broomstick wedding,” a popular marital tradition usually associated with Black Americans. Additionally, he is co-authoring a book with historian Charlton W. Yingling that examines how Europeans and Euro-Americans used canines to attack and subordinate Black people who resisted slavery and oppression.

Treasurer–Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Phillip Luke Sinitiere is a scholar of American religious history and African American studies. He currently teaches history and humanities at the College of Biblical Studies, a predominantly African American school located in Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District. In 2019-2020 he is a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Sinitiere’s latest articles examine religion and art in the Sandra Bland movement, the Black Radical Tradition and W. E. B. Du Bois’s legacy, and Du Bois and poetry. His recent books include Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (Oxford University Press, 2013); Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History (University of Missouri Press, 2014); Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity (New York University Press, 2015); and Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois (Northwestern University Press, 2019).

Secretary–Grace D. Gipson

Grace D. Gipson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies with a designated emphasis in New Media from the University of California Berkeley, MA in African American Studies at Georgia State University, and BA in Psychology from Clark Atlanta University. Grace is Black future feminist/pop culture scholar whose research explores Black popular culture, digital humanities, representations of race and gender within comic books, Afrofuturism, and race and new media. Grace’s recent publications include “Creating and Imagining Black Futures through Afrofuturism” in the edited collection #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sex, and Nation; “What Can The Hunger Games Teach Us About Bitch Planet’s Megaton?” as part of Hard Women, Hard Time: Bitch Planet Comics Studies Roundtable in The Middle Spaces; and “Afro-Futurism’s Musical Princess Janelle Monae: Psychadelic Soul Message Music Infused with a Sci-Fi Twist” in the edited collection Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, Vol. I. Her current book project seeks to explore Black female identities as personified in comics and fandom culture. A second project examines how online Black female academic and popular networks produce cultural and technical capital, which act as safe spaces that showcase, interrogate, and celebrate the blending of popular culture and the academy.

Interim Events Coordinator–Adam McNeil

Adam McNeil is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University focusing on Black Women’s lives during the Revolutionary and Founding eras in the Chesapeake Bay. My scholarship focuses on how enslaved women were key contributors to the Chesapeake’s culture of rebelliousness during the Age of Revolutions, which, by implication, centers the region as a critical site of slave insurrection and revolutionary activity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Secondarily, I focus on histories of Appalachian mountain slavery and labor histories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My research has been supported by fellowships from the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture (OI). Of note, in 2021, I became the Omohundro’s inaugural OI Audio Fellow, a new fellowship meant to present “fresh histories of the American Revolution” via the narrative podcast medium. In addition to academic writing, I regularly contribute to academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, along with interviewing scholars on the New Books in African American Studies podcast, where I have interviewed nearly one hundred scholars about their works in African American Studies and African American History.