Blog Announcements: New Members of the Editing Team!

The editing team of Black Perspectives is excited to begin the next academic year! Thank you for supporting us over these past 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 Robert Greene II, who previously served as lead associate editor, has agreed to serve as senior editor of the blog. Under Dr. Greene‘s leadership, we are excited to welcome a new managing editor, new associate editor, and two new assistant editors to our already stellar team! Please join us in welcoming them to Black Perspectives!

Senior Editor

Robert Greene II 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. Along with Tyler D. Parry, Dr. Greene is the co-editor of Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2021). He is also working on his first solo-authored 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.

Managing Editor

Tiana U. Wilson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History with a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include Black Women’s Internationalism, Black Women’s Intellectual History, Women of Color Organizing, and Third World Feminism. At UT, she led her department’s Anti-Racism Action Committee (2020-2021), served as the 2019-2020 Graduate Research Assistant for the Institute for Historical Studies, and was a research fellow for the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy between the years of 2017-2019. In the broader intellectual community, Tiana is the graduate student representative for the Association of Black Women Historians. Her dissertation has been supported by the 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. Follow her on Twitter @PhenomenalTiana.

Associate Editor

Melissa N. Shaw is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University studying the university’s connection to slavery and colonization. In fall 2022, Dr. Shaw joins McGill’s Department of History and Classical Studies as an Assistant Professor. Her first book project is tentatively titled “Blackness and British ‘Fair Play’: Burgeoning Black Social Activism in Ontario and Grassroots Responses to the Canadian Colour Line.” It explores the understudied, informal everyday acts of resistance Black Canadian women crafted to fight anti-Black racism during the interwar period. Dr. Shaw’s work and writing have been published in Histoire sociale/Social History, Journal of African American History, Race & Class, and Slavery, Memory, Citizenship. Follow her on Twitter @MelissaNShaw.

Assistant Editors

Gloria Ashaolu is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Michigan State University. In spring 2020, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. from the Department of History, a B.A. from the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies, and a minor certificate in Education. Her commitment to historical research coupled with effective, innovative, and instructional practices that will dismantle structural barriers, is rooted in her desire for a fair and inclusive society that advances the lives of people within the Black diaspora and promotes the betterment of humanity. A culmination of her community-rooted engagements and academic work also inform how she hopes to create change through learning and teaching, and the creation of meaningful historical work that helps us better understand the present through our collective history. Her fields of interest include Black women’s history, Black intellectual history, the Black historical enterprise, and the history of Black education. Her research examines the contributions of Black female teachers in the Early Black History Movement. The broader impact of this study not only entails a better understanding of how Black women professionals worked as active agents in order to advance the Black freedom struggle, but it also offers us an insight into how Black female teachers informally became part of the Black intellectual tradition during the late 19th and early 20th century.

Joshua L. Crutchfield is a scholar of 20th century Black freedom movements, intellectual history and carceral studies. He is a PhD student in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he’s working on his dissertation project titled, “Imprisoned Black Women Intellectuals: Mae Mallory, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Safiya Bukhari and the Struggle for Abolition, 1961-1890.” Crutchfield’s scholarship has appeared in publications such as The Black Scholar, Ethnic and Third World Review of Books, Reviews in Digital Humanities, The Austin Chronicle, and in the African American Intellectual Historical Society’s award-winning blog “Black Perspectives.” Crutchfield is also a budding digital humanist. In 2015, he co-founded #BlkTwitterstorians, a digital humanities project that connects, supports, and affirms the scholarship of Black historians and academics on Twitter. In addition, his scholarship employs digital methods to visualize prison abolitionists’ language usage in his paper titled, “Text Mining The Abolitionist: Critical Resistance, Counter-Hegemonic Definitions, and Building the Case for Abolition.” Crutchfield’s community activism drives his scholarship. In 2015, he and a determined cadre of activists co-founded Black Lives Matter Nashville, a community-based group that organizes to end state-sanctioned violence against black people in Nashville. In 2021, Crutchfield was awarded the Harry Ransom Center’s inaugural UT-Austin fellowship. He resides in Austin, TX with his partner Tiffany and chihuahua Tinkerbell. Follow him on Twitter at @Crutch4.