Blog Announcements: Meet the Editing Team!

The editing team of Black Perspectives is excited to begin the next academic year! Thank you for supporting us over these few years! We extend our sincere thanks to the talented writers who contribute excellent pieces to the blog; participate in our forums and roundtables; and review books for us. As we enter the Fall semester, we look forward to expanding the content of the blog, highlighting a wide array of fields, methods, and methodologies. The new year also brings a few changes to the blog’s editing team and roster of contributors.

We’re thrilled to share the news that Menika Dirkson joins the blog as the lead senior editor! She will be working closely with senior editors Reighan Gillam, Robert Greene II, Tiana Wilson, DJ Polite, and Ashley Everson. Joshua Crutchfield continues to serve as a managing editor–now alongside new managing editor Kiana Knight. Adam Lee Cilli also continues serving as book review editor. And finally, we welcome two new assistant editors: Mikayla Harden and Sekordri Ojo. Please join us in celebrating this year’s editing team of Black Perspectives!


Lead Senior Editor

Menika Dirkson, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of African American History at Morgan State University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Temple University while her M.A. in History and B.A. in History, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Studies are from Villanova University. She has received grants from the Philadelphia Foundation and Thomas Jefferson University’s Arlen Specter Center for her research on police-Black community relations in Philadelphia following the Civil Rights Era. Dirkson’s research and writing have appeared in articles for the Urban History Association’s The Metropole and the Washington Post. She is the author of Hope and Struggle in the Policed City: The Rise of Black Criminalization and Resistance in Philadelphia (New York University Press, 2024). You can follow her on Twitter @Philadelphian91.

Senior Editors

Ashley Everson is a PhD candiate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Ashley earned her B.A. with honors distinction in Social Thought and Political Economy and her  M.A.  in Political Science with a graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, political theory, labor history, and Black women’s political histories. Her most recent research seeks to investigate the relationship between Black political mobilization in the Tennessee Valley region and decolonial organizing throughout the African Diaspora during the interwar period. You can follow her on Twitter @aevers0n.

Reighan Gillam, PhD is an ethnographer of Black visual culture. She is an associate professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines media at the intersection of racial ideologies, anti-racism, and protest. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that Afro-Brazilian media producers create images that render Black subjects and their experiences in complex ways. Her first book, Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media will be published in March 2022 from the University of Illinois Press. She earned a BA in Anthropology and Afro-American and African Studies from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Cornell University.  Gillam’s next research project takes a transnational approach to the study of Black politics and culture. Her second book, entitled Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism examines how Afro-Brazilians engage African American people, culture, and performance. Gillam served as the Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She was elected to the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association.

Robert Greene II, PhD is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Claflin University. Dr. Greene serves as book reviews editor and blogger for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians. He also serves as Chief Instructor for the South Carolina Progressive Network’s Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights. Currently, Dr. Greene is co-editing, with Tyler D. Parry, a collection of essays on the history of African Americans at the University of South Carolina. He is also working on his first book, examining the role of Southern African Americans in the Democratic Party from 1964 through the 1990s. Finally, Dr. Greene has published several articles and book chapters on the intersection of memory, politics, and African American history, and has written for numerous popular publications, including The Nation, Oxford American, Dissent, Scalawag, Jacobin, In These Times, Politico, and The Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @robgreeneII

DJ Polite, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy at Augusta University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in American studies from Williams College, a master’s in education from CUNY-Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. in history from the University of South Carolina. Prior work includes teaching special education in a public charter high school, and as a historic guide and interpreter for home museums in South Carolina. His research looks primarily on the mutually reinforcing growth of U.S. Jim Crow policies and empire in the Caribbean, particularly Puerto Rico. It explores the ways that the solidification of both relied on each other and cemented secondary citizenship status for African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and especially women of both groups. He presented at organizations such as the South Carolina Historical Association, the Latin American Section of the Southern Historical Association, the African American Intellectual History Society, the Puerto Rican Studies Association, as well as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He has a chapter in the edited volume Reconstruction and Empire, published by Fordham University Press and has written for online publications such as Black Perspectives, Washington Post, and the Activist History Review.

Tiana U. Wilson, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow in African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and an incoming assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (Fall 2024). She recently completed a Ph.D. in History with a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Wilson’s broader research interests include Black Women’s Internationalism, Black Women’s Intellectual History, Women of Color Organizing, and Third World Feminism. Drawing on political speeches, newsletters, articles, pamphlets, and travel logs, her book project, “Revolution and Struggle: The Enduring Legacy of the Third World Women’s Alliance,” traces the intellectual genealogies of a “women of color” feminist praxis rooted in the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements of the 1970s and still used today for political activity. Her project examines Black women’s contributions to women of color feminist groups in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Center for Engaged Scholarship, Sallie Bingham Center, Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, Smith College Libraries, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. You can follow her on Twitter @PhenomenalTiana

Managing Editors

Joshua L. Crutchfield is a scholar of 20th century Black freedom movements, intellectual history and carceral studies. He is a PhD candidate at the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he’s completing his dissertation project titled, “Imprisoned Black Women Intellectuals: Mae Mallory, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur and Safiya Bukhari and the Black Power Roots of Abolition, 1955-1980.” Crutchfield’s scholarship and writing has appeared in The Black Scholar, Black Perspectives, Reviews in Digital Humanities, The Black Power Encyclopedia, and The Austin Chronicle.  A budding digital humanist, in 2015, Crutchfield co-founded #BlkTwitterstorians, a digital humanities project that connects, supports, and affirms the scholarship of Black historians and academics on Twitter. His forthcoming paper entitled “Text Mining The Abolitionist: Critical Resistance, Counter-Hegemonic Definitions, and Building the Case for Abolition,” employs digital methods to visualize prison abolitionists’ use of language when making arguments for prison abolition.Crutchfield’s scholarship has been supported by the Harry Random Center and the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Women and Politics.

Kiana Knight is a PhD Candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation, “Translating Black Nationalism: Gender, Language, and Internationalist Politics, 1918-1955,” explores bilingual Black women’s activism in the U.S. and Greater Caribbean. Her work has been featured in Ohio State’s Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective and Getty Images’ collaborative blog “Picturing Black History” and the African American Intellectual Historical Society’s award-winning blog, “Black Perspectives.” She received a bachelor’s degree with honors in history from North Carolina Central University and a master’s degree in history from the University of Pittsburgh. Kiana’s scholarly interests include Public History, Black Transnational Feminisms, Black Internationalism, and the African Diaspora. In her free time, she enjoys exploring her family’s history, socializing with friends, and practicing yoga. Connect with her on Twitter @kianamknight.


Book Review Editor
Adam Lee Cilli, PhD earned his doctorate in history at the University of Maine in 2016 and currently serves as an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.  He is the author of Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945 (University of Georgia Press, 2021).  This book illuminates the social justice efforts of journalists, scholars, social workers, medical experts, lawyers, and other professionals who navigated the fraught racial landscape of the urban North during the first phase of the Great Migration. Upending traditional depictions of Black reform work that stress its essential ties to racial uplift ideology, Canaan, Dim and Far shows how reformers experimented with a variety of strategies as they moved fluidly across ideologies and political alliances to find practical solutions to profound inequities. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Women’s HistoryJournal of Urban History, and Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.  Follow him on Twitter @LeeCilli.

Assistant Editors

Mikayla Harden is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on the Black childhood experience in the 18th and 19th century. Before Delaware, she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with departmental honors in African and African Diaspora Studies. She has an academic interest in gender, race, and medicine centering the experience of Black children. Additionally, she interested in the Atlantic world, especially the Francophone and Anglophone nations.

Sekordri Ojo is a doctoral student in the History Department and a graduate concentrator in the Black Studies department at the University of Illinois Chicago. She was born and raised on the south side of Chicago and attended DePaul University, where she double majored in History and African & Black Diaspora studies. After graduating from DePaul, Sekordri joined Teach for America in 2014 where she taught reading and history on the south side of Chicago. Sekordri enjoys spending time with her family and her two fur babies. Sekordri’s research focuses on the intellectual history of African American women educators of the nineteenth century. Moreover, Sekordri is interested in how African American women have historically used education as a tool to redefine what it meant to be free and citizens of America.

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