Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Legal history, Jim Crow, African American, a United States, 19th Century, 20th Century

About Me: I am a Chapel Hill, North Carolina native and I joined the University of South Carolina History Department as a Research Fellow in Fall 2019. I will begin my role as an Assistant Professor of African American History in Fall 2020. My dissertation, titled Public Wrongs, Private Rights: African Americans, Private Law, and White Violence during Jim Crow, explores black legal culture in the face of white-on-black violence under Jim Crow and black civil litigation’s impact on civil law. My interest in social justice drives my research, which focuses on the ways that oppressed persons, particularly African Americans, use their legal imaginations. I have earned the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Research in Legal History Research Grant among other research grants to advance my research on black legal culture, civil law, and Jim Crow. I have also received the Mellon/American Council for Learned Scholars Dissertation Completion Fellowship to complete my dissertation, and I am a Kathryn T. Preyer Fellow and J. Willard Hurst Fellow through the American Society for Legal History and the University of Wisconsin School of Law. I am committed to the recovery of lost histories and voices, to the cultivation of historical and civic debate, and civic engagement and I hope my work will foster discussion inside and outside of the academy.

Expertise by Topic: Emancipation, Gender, Law, Local & Regional, Material Culture, Race, Rebellion & Revolution