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About Me

I am a writer, artist, scholar, and curator. Her work is deeply invested in the politics of care as it relates to art, labor, injustice, community, technology, international affairs, the home, public spaces, and diasporic connections amongst women and femmes.

Between 2021-2024, she served as the inaugural women’s history curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) through the American Women’s History Initiative, where she stewarded material culture, exhibitions, talks, and programs at the museum through the lens of Black women’s history. Her proudest achievements are coordinating the Annie Bell Shepherd internship program, co-curating “Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism,” acquiring Nilda Comas’s Bethune plaster sculpture, and organizing the African American Quilt Taskforce.

She now serves as the chief curator and director of collections at the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket.

She is also a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, where her dissertation looks at Etta Moten Barnett’s Cold War radio program through the lens of the role of the arts in international affairs, cultural diplomacy, and the African Diaspora.

This research has been supported by the Schlesinger Library, the Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center, and the Social Science Research Council. She has taught classes related to monuments through United States history, African American history, and slavery through cultural studies.

She was born in Sacramento, spent her formative years in rural Kansas and the DMV, and became an adopted Chicagoan–a variety of geographic areas that have shaped her research, political, and curatorial perspectives. She currently splits her time between Washington, D.C. and Boston.

Recent Publications

Academic Publications

Encyclopedia Entries

• “Marita Bonner” in The Harlem Renaissance: An Encyclopedia of Arts, Culture, and History (forthcoming)
• “Etta Moten Barnett” in American National Biography – Oxford University Press (forthcoming)

Book Reviews

• Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri, The Journal of African American History (2021)
• Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, History in the Making Volume 9 (2016)

Articles

• “Sounding Off: Etta Moten’s Diasporic Radio Activism, 1950-60.” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (Vol. 2, Number 3, Fall 2021)
• “Rhodes Fallen: Student Activism in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” History in the Making Volume 10 (2017) (co-authored with Amanda Castro)

Edited Volumes

• “When Glamour Was African: Etta Moten Barnett and Pan-African Fashion,” Ubuntu Dialogues. Michigan State University Press (June 2024)
• “The Gendered Contours of Afrofuturism,” Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures (Smithsonian Books)
• “Fashioning Gender & Power in Hip-Hop,” in Musical Crossroads (co-written with Timothy Anne Burnside) (Smithsonian Books)

Public Writing
• Edwardian Promenade (2007-Present)
• Evangeline Holland (pseudonym), articles in The History Magazine, Learning Through History, novella published by William Morrow/HarperCollins

Media Coverage

Social Media

@theglamorousacademic

Country Focus

United States, Caribbean, UK & Europe, West Africa

Expertise by Geography

Africa, Atlantic, Caribbean, United Kingdom, United States, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century, Modern, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

American Revolution, American Founding Era, Book History, Colonialism, Diplomacy, Emancipation, Gender, Law, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Museums, Public History, Race, Rebellion & Revolution, Sexuality, Slavery, Technology, Women, World War I, World War II