Scholarship

  • The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship

    Across humanities disciplines, public scholarship brings academics and community members and organizations together in mutually-beneficial partnership for research, teaching, and programming. While the field of publicly engaged humanities scholarship has been growing for some time, there are few volumes that have attempted to define and represent its scope. The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship brings together wide-ranging case studies sharing perspectives on this work, grounded in its practice in the United States.

    The collection begins with chapters reflecting on theories and practices of public humanities scholarship. The case studies that follow are organized around six areas of particular impact in public humanities scholarship: Informing contemporary debates; amplifying community voices and histories; helping individuals and communities navigate difficult experiences; preserving culture in times of crisis and change; expanding educational access; and building and supporting public scholarship. The Companion concludes with a glossary, introducing select concepts. Taken together, these resources offer an overview for students and practitioners of public humanities scholarship, creating an accessible vocabulary rooted in the practices that have so advanced academic and community life.

    Although drawing on case studies from within the US, these examples offer perspectives and insights relevant to public humanities around the world. This book will be of interest to anyone working within the public humanities or wanting to make their work public and engage with wider communities.

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  • Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor: Black Womanhood and the Visual Politics of Mixed Race Family Photo Albums 1918-2020

    Completed towards a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, this study explores the photographic representation of mixed race black-white families in the 20th and 21st centuries, and examines how iconic images of racially mixed kinship shift in relation to black politics and culture. In doing so, my dissertation also illustrates the shifting reception of Black and racially mixed women’s curatorial visions of interracial black-white kinship over the past century. It ultimately marks how Black women’s uses and narration of the public and private family archive situates interracial kinship within (rather than apart from) Black gender, sexual, and class politics and aesthetics. (Image source: Grey Villet/Life and Time Pictures/Getty Images)

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  • Beyond “Biracial Cool”: Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray, and the Politics of the Mixed Race Family (2021)

    Read my article in American Quarterly exploring the visual representation of Bill de Blasio’s mixed-race family during his 2013 mayoral campaign. (image courtesy of New York Magazine)

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As a researcher and writer, my work explores Black aesthetic and visual culture, with an emphasis on women and gender, family history, interracial kinship, and social movements. I also teach and study Public Humanities, with a focus on the theory and practice of engaged scholarship.

Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors

In a brief interview with image-based artist Ricky Weaver, Weaver and I discuss our time together in 2018-2019 while on fellowship at the Carr Center and working with a group of ten artists and curators and resident artist Carrie Mae Weems.

Contributors to this volume of The Black Aesthetic include Jamal Batts, Leila Weefur, Ra Malika Imhotep, nan collymore, Arisa White, Michael Boyce Gillespie, Leigh Raiford, Michele May Curry & Ricky Weaver, Renee Royale, See Black Women, Sasha Kelley and Andrew Wilson.

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Selected works

 

  • University of Michigan Rackham Proquest Distinguished Dissertation Award (2022)

    Edward Bouchet Honors Society (2021)

    Harvard University Visiting Dissertation Fellowship (2019-2021)

    Carr Center Independent Scholars Fellowship with Resident Artist Carrie Mae Weems (2018-2019)

    Institute for Research on Women and Gender Community of Scholars Fellowship, University of Michigan (2019)

    Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Fellowship, UIUC (2018)

  • Guest respondent, Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Grants convening, 10 June 2021.

    Discussant for “Kamala Harris and the Reframing of the Vice Presidency,” panel as part of University of Michigan’s campus wide Democracy & Debate theme semester, 25 January, 2021

    Moderator of “Beyond the Gaze: Writing Multidimension Black Characters for The Stage and Screen, A Conversation with Maxine Lyle and Katori Hall,” Williams College 62’ Center event series, October 23, 2020

    “That Image Business:” Loving v Virginia and The Iconography of Interracialism,” Panelist, Paper presented at the American Studies Association Annual meeting, 11 November, 2019.

    “The Mixed-Race Movement Girl: Coming of Age 1965-1985,” Panelist, Paper presented at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender Community of Scholars Symposium, 25 October, 2019.

    “My Pliant Dido: Revisiting the Cultural Memory of Dido Elizabeth Belle in the Critical Mixed-Race Moment,” Paper presented at the African Atlantic Futures Conference, University of Leeds, 2 September 2018.

    “Photographing Loving: Contesting the Visual Politics of Mildred Loving,” Panelist and Panel Chair, Paper presented at “Black Portraitures IV: The Color of Silence,” Harvard University, 17 March 2018.

  • (forthcoming, 2023) Fisher-Livne, Daniel and Michelle May-Curry (eds), Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship, Routledge.