Eshe Sherley holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. Her fellowship project, "Care in Crisis: Black Women and the Politics of Labor in Atlanta, 1968-1984," argues that a network of working poor Black women in Atlanta demanded that national and state governments invest in infrastructures of care. Through their organizing, Sherley shows that they developed a Black feminist politics of social reproduction.
Micah Jones completed a PhD in African American Studies and History at Yale University. Her project, "Jim Crow Prerogatives: Race and Consumption in the United States South, 1890-1980," examines Black southerners’ experiences grocery shopping in the Jim Crow South. It contends that groceries, as racially mixed spaces amidst segregation, were key sites of race-making. It demonstrates how grocery stores laid the groundwork for a facially race neutral, but functionally racist, post-Jim Crow racial regime.
Malcolm Cammeron is a doctoral candidate in the department of History at the University of Virginia. Malcolm's dissertation explores the intersections of urban planning, urban and environmental equalities, and social movements in the U.S. South. Following World War II, many southern cities undertook ambitious planning and development initiatives to fuel the region’s growth, drive modernization, and fortify Jim Crow. His dissertation is a case study that examines how contestation over changing urban environments informed the local Black freedom struggle.
Olivia Polk is a doctoral candidate in the departments of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Polk's project, “We Can Dream the Dark,” excavates the archive of Black lesbian cultural production since 1977. It argues that this archive’s experiments in aesthetic form yields a robust social ethic— Black lesbianism— that has shaped Black queer radical politics from the early HIV/AIDS pandemic to contemporary responses the climate crisis.
Jameelah Imani Morris is a PhD Candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from Tufts University and M.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University. Her research centers on anti-Black state violence, social movements, youth political cultures, and urban displacement across the Americas. Her current project is an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study investigating the impacts of state violence on Black communities, and responses to them, across generations in Colombia.
Jasper works on the history of disabled African Americans in the modern U.S. South. Combining archival research with oral history, his work explores the lived experiences of Black disabled people at residential schools, at work, and in the community. His work is informed by the birth of his second child, who is Deaf. Disability Studies Quarterly is publishing his article “Blind and Deaf Together: Cross-Disability Community at Virginia’s Residential School for Black Disabled Youth” in an upcoming issue of the peer-reviewed journal.
Frances Bell is a PhD candidate in History at William & Mary, focusing on the legalities of slavery in the age of abolition. Her dissertation, titled "'In a State of Flight': The Struggle for Freedom in the Haitian Diaspora, 1791-1830," examines the legal and social interactions of several thousand people who were taken as slaves from revolutionary Haiti to the United States by enslavers fleeing the revolution.
Between 1938 and 1942, the South Carolina Public Service Authority sought to displace 901 black families and dig up and flood over 9,000 graves for rural redevelopment. This dissertation challenges government and capitalist conceptions of value by conceptualizing and documenting a “conjure value” among South Carolina’s African-descended people.
This project explores the historical and ongoing conditions that make nighttime one of the most embattled terrains of life in Lagos as well as the quotidian ways people reclaim and inhabit nighttime as a site of possibility in the shadow of the ongoing catastrophe of racial capitalism.
My project is the first study of West African history to consider its Arabic tradition of arithmetic texts. It presents an intellectual history of 19th century Saharan West Africa focusing on manuscripts on arithmetical calculations (ḥisāb) and their applications to the elaborated system of rules of Muslim inheritance shares (farāʾiḍ).
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