Introducing the New Editorial Board of ‘Black Perspectives’
We’re excited to announce the creation of a new editorial board for the blog, which includes a diverse group of scholars who have agreed to assist with reviewing guest submissions. Members of the editorial board will also help to shape the direction of Black Perspectives and organize online forums on topics related to their areas of expertise. Please join us in welcoming the following scholars to the editorial board who will serve in this capacity for the next three years.
Derrick P. Alridge is Professor of History of Education at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. His research examines Black educational and intellectual history and the Black Freedom Struggle. His book, The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History, provides a comprehensive interpretation of the trajectory of Du Bois’s educational thought. Alridge is also co-author with James B. Stewart and V.P. Franklin of Message in the Music: Hip Hop, History & Pedagogy. His work has appeared in Journal of African American History, History of Education Quarterly, Journal of Negro Education, Teachers College Record, and in other volumes edited by himself and others. His book-in-progress, The Hip-Hop Mind: Ideas, History, and Social Consciousness, explores the history of black social thought from 1967 to the present through the lens hip-hop. Alridge also serves as associate editor for the Journal of African American History and President-Elect of the History of Education Society. Recently, he became UVA’s Director of the Center for Race and Public Education in the South and Director of Teachers in the Movement, an oral and intellectual history project that examines the ideas and pedagogy of teachers during the civil rights movement. Follow him on Twitter @DerrickPAlridge.
Ana Lucia Araujo is a full professor in the Department of History of Howard University. Her research explores the history, memory, and heritage of slavery. She authored or edited over ten books on these themes, including Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (2010), Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage and Slavery (2014), and Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics (2015). Since November 2017 she is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. Her latest single authored book, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. The book examines from a transnational perspective the history of the demands of reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Follow her on Twitter @analuciaraujo_.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste is a scholar and activist who sees the classroom and the campus as a space to engage contemporary issues with a sensibility of the past. Her academic training is in history and historical archaeology. Her research is primarily focused on how the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality look through an archaeological lens. Her work ranges from interpreting captive African domestic spaces at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation, to the early history of school segregation in Boston at the Abiel Smith School on Beacon Hill, to the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite (or House of the Black Burghardts) in Great Barrington, Mass., or the complexities of creating a community-driven heritage tourist site at Millars Plantation, on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera – her ability to translate material culture and artifacts into complex interpretations of African American domestic life has made her a pioneer in her field. Her first book, Black Feminist Archaeology (Left Coast Press, 2011), outlines the basic tenets of Black feminist thought and research for archaeologists and shows how it can be used to improve contemporary historical archaeology as a whole. At the moment, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and serves as the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst. Follow her on Twitter @blackfemarch.
Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University Pennsylvania. Prior to Penn, Bay worked at Rutgers University, where she was a Professor of History and the Director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. Professor Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history, whose recent interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. Bay’s publications include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014); as well as many articles and book chapters. She is also the co-author, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2012,1st Edition, 2016, 2nd Edition), and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.
Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Specializing in African Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, decolonial theory, visual culture, diaspora, and medicine—especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Julius is currently completing his first book manuscript, tentatively entitled “Black Patience: Performance and the Civil Rights Movement.” His work appears in Callaloo, American Literary History, Text and Performance Quarterly, The James Baldwin Review, and The Southern Quarterly. Currently serving as an Associate Editor of Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, he has been awarded fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute. In 2018, Julius received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Comparative and International Education Society. Follow him on Twitter @juliusflemingjr.
Thavolia Glymph is professor of History at Duke University in the Departments of History and African & African American Studies and a Faculty Affiliate of the Duke University Population Research Institute (DuPri) and the Program in Women’s Studies. Glymph is a historian of the nineteenth century U.S. South specializing in gender and women’s history, slavery, emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. She has published numerous articles and essays and is the author of the prize-winning Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and co-editor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Series 1, Volume 1 and and Series 1, Volume 3). She is currently completing two book projects, Women at War: Race, Gender, and Power in the American Civil War and African American Women and Children Refugees in the Civil War. Her next project is entitled “Playing “Dixie” in Egypt: Civil War Veterans in the Egyptian Army and Transnational Transcripts of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship, 1869-1878.” Glymph is the recipient of a grant support from the National Institutes of Health for her work on Civil War refugees. She was the 2015 John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School and will hold this appointment again in the Spring 2018 term. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Kennetta Hammond Perry is an Associate Professor of History at East Carolina University. She specializes in Atlantic World history with a particular emphasis on transnational race politics, empire, migration and movements for citizenship among people of African descent in Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. Perry teaches courses in the department of History and the program in African & African American Studies. She has published in the Journal of British Studies, Atlantic Studies and Twentieth Century British History and has completed a book, London Is The Place For Me:Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her book examines how a largely Afro-Caribbean population of Black Britons advocated for citizenship rights and transformed the political landscape in Britain in the decades following World War II. Perry earned B.A. degrees in History and Political Science at North Carolina Central University and a doctoral degree in Comparative Black History from Michigan State University. Before arriving at East Carolina, she completed a predoctoral research fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African &African American Studies and served as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at Duke University. Additionally, she has received research support from the American Council of Learned Societies and she has served as a visiting faculty fellow at the Institute of Arts & Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow her on Twitter @KennettaPerry.
Kwame Holmes is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Holmes earned his PhD in Modern American History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research engages the intersection of race, sexuality, class identities and politics within the history of the modern city. His work has been published in Occasion, the Radical History Review, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies and The Routledge history of Queer America. He is at work on his book manuscript, Queer Removal: Liberalism and Displacement in the Nation’s Capital, which narrates how the racial, gender and sexual diversification of the middle class in the wake of the civil rights, women’s and gay liberation struggles in the Washington Metropolitan Area, one of the most progressive in the nation, foreclosed the possibility that “Chocolate City” could belong to the city’s working class black majority by the end of the 20th century. Follow him on Twitter @KwameHolmes.
Justin Hosbey is a sociocultural anthropologist, interdisciplinary ethnographer, and a student of Black Studies. Broadly, his intellectual work is interested in the ways that Black Americans have resisted anti-Black violence from the beginnings of racial slavery through its afterlife — using, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, “every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent.” More specifically, his ethnographic work explores Black social life in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mississippi Delta regions, focusing on the ways that southern Black communities articulate insurgent modes of citizenship that demand the interruption of racial capitalism. Hosbey has also worked as an oral historian for the Alachua County African American History Project and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program’s Mississippi Freedom Project. He received his doctorate in Cultural Anthropology with a certificate in Digital Humanities from the University of Florida in 2016. This past academic year, he was a postdoctoral fellow for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded ‘Synergies Among Digital Humanities & African American History and Culture’ initiative at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently writing a book based on his dissertation, “Charter Schools, Black Social Life, and the Refusal of Death in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” an ethnographic project, which utilizes research methods from the digital and spatial humanities to explore and visualize how the destruction of neighborhood schools in low income and working class Black communities has fractured, but not broken, Black space and place making in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Cherisse Jones-Branch is the James and Wanda Lee Vaughn Endowed Professor of History and Director of the ASTATE Digital Press at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro. She teaches courses in U.S., Women’s, Civil Rights, Rural, African American History, and Heritage Studies. Jones-Branch received her Bachelors and Master degrees from the College of Charleston, South Carolina, and a doctorate in History from The Ohio State University, Columbus. She has been teaching at Arkansas State University since 2003. Jones-Branch is the author of numerous articles on women’s Civil Rights activism. In 2014, she published Crossing the Line: Women and Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II, with the University Press of Florida and is the co-editor of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2018. She is also working on a second monograph, Better Living By Their Own Bootstraps: Rural Black Women’s Activism in Arkansas, which is under contract with the University of Arkansas Press. Follow her on Twitter @crjbranch.
Chernoh M. Sesay, Jr. is an historian of the Black Atlantic and of colonial North American and antebellum United States history whose research focuses on the intersection of religion, black political thought, identity, and community formation. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Black Boston and the Making of African-American Freemasonry: Leadership, Religion, and Community in Early America. In this study, the early development of black Freemasonry, from its founder, Prince Hall, to its prominent antebellum member, David Walker, becomes a prism through which to consider various relationships between religion, gender, community, and interracial and black politics. He is also exploring how different forms of nineteenth and twentieth-century African American historicism were comprised of aligned and competing theological and secular concerns. He has published a book chapter in addition to articles in the New England Quarterly, the Journal of African American Studies, and the Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies. In addition to book reviews written for the Massachusetts Historical Review, H-Net Law, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the Journal of American History, Dr. Sesay has also written for Black Perspectives, the scholarly blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. Follow him on Twitter @CMSesayJr1.