Solidarities: Black Girlhood Conversations
dialogues at the intersection of social justice and black girlhood studies
Join Kabria Baumgartner (Northeastern University), Annette Joseph-Gabriel (University of Michigan), Aria Halliday (University of Kentucky), Habiba Ibrahim (University of Washington), Nazera Wright (University of Kentucky), and Crystal Webster (University of British Columbia) for a SOLIDARITIES discussion about the promise, perils, and radical resistance of Black girlhood—past, present, and future.
Moderated by Christina Thomas (Johns Hopkins University)
Hosted by Taller Electric Marronage and co-sponsored by the JHU Center for Africana Studies
SOLIDARITIES: Black Girlhood Conversations
Thursday, February 10th, 2022
3pm EST / 12pm PST
Register here: https://bit.ly/EMBlackGirl
Meet the Participants
Kabria Baumgartner is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies as well as Associate Director of Public History at Northeastern University. She is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, specializing in the history of education and African American women’s and gender history. She is the author of the award- winning book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, which tells the story of Black girls and women who fought for their educational rights in the nineteenth-century Northeast. Her research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She has also published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and her popular writing has been featured in the Washington Post, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and Historic New England Magazine. She is writing a book about Black youth and the fight for civil rights in nineteenth-century Boston.
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on race, gender, and citizenship in the French-speaking Caribbean, Africa, and France. Her book, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press, 2020) mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of Black women in the French empire. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Slavery & Abolition, Eighteenth-Century Studies and The French Review, and her public writings have been featured in Al Jazeera and HuffPost. She is a recipient of the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics. She is also the managing editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International and production editor of Women in French Studies.
Aria S. Halliday, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Halliday specializes in cultural constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood in material, visual, and digital culture in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. She is the editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019) and co-editor of a special issue on hip-hop feminism in Journal of Hip Hop Studies (2020). Her articles are featured in Cultural Studies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Girlhood Studies, Palimpsest, and SOULS. Her book, Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture is forthcoming with the University of Illinois Press. Dr. Halliday is a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow (2020-2021) and has served as the co- chair of the Girls and Girls’ Studies Caucus at the National Women’s Studies Association since 2016.
Habiba Ibrahim is associate professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (2012) and Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (2021). She is the co-editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue, “Black Temporality in Times of Crisis” (January 2022). Among other venues, her work appears in African American Review and American Literary History.
Crystal Lynn Webster is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on Black women and children in early America. Her book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2021), is a social history of African American children and foregrounds their lives as fundamental to the process of the North’s prolonged transition from slavery to freedom. She is currently writing her second book, tentatively titled Criminalizing Freedom: African Americans and the Making of Criminal Reform in Early America. Additionally, her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Black Perspectives. Her research has been supported through grants from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Nazera Sadiq Wright is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her book, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. Her research is supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During 2017–18, she was in residence at the Library Company of Philadelphia as a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Program in African American History Fellow to advance her second book on the influence of libraries on the literary careers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American women writers.
Moderator: Christina Thomas is a PhD candidate in History at the Johns Hopkins University. She received her Masters of Arts in History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include African American history, Black women’s history, Black girlhood, and family history. Thomas is currently completing her dissertation on What Shall We Teach Our Students Who Are Black?: The Intellectual Biography of Geraldine Wilson, which examines the life of civil rights worker, educator, and specialist in early Black childhood education, Geraldine L. Wilson (1931-1986). Thomas is interested in digital Black humanities and the possibilities it offers historic Black sites and institutions across Baltimore City. Most recently, she served as co-curator for the City People: Black Baltimore Through the Photographs of John Clark Mayden where she produced a digital exhibition and a short documentary. You can learn more about her work here.