Founding Electricians
Halle Ashby
Halle-Mackenzie Ashby is a PhD candidate in History at the Johns Hopkins University. She holds a Masters of Arts in History from the University of Toronto, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in the Honours History program from McGill University. Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation, and her research concerns questions about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. She is working on her current project—“Conscripts of the State: Urban Women in Post-Emancipation Bridgetown Barbados 1864 – 1890”.
Jada Similton
Jada Similton is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at Michigan State University. A spiritual and cultural worker, Jada is a writer and independent scholar who’s work is at the intersection of Black and Indigenous feminist life and culture. A former MSU MUSE Fellow and Diaspora Solidarities Lab Fellow, Jada spearheaded the creation the Electric Guide to Black and Indigenous American Literature and the Biographies of Maroons, Insurgents, and Enslaved Peoples for Electric Marronage.
Stephany Bravo
Stephany Bravo is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University pursuing a dual degree in English and Chicano/Latino Studies. Their research centers on cultural production in the city of Compton, California. Specifically on how murals, poetry, and archival photographs provide narratives that contextualize the lived experiences of Black and Latinx communities beyond narratives of erasure. Stephany is an inaugural MUSE Scholar, University Enrichment Fellow and one of the assistant editors for Electric Marronage.
Kelsey Moore
Kelsey Moore is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on southern African American History. She is also the Lead Chair of the Mardi Gras Indian Traditions: Going Global, Going Online under LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Her current dissertation examines how the rural development plan of the Santee-Cooper Project disturbed interwoven ecological, spiritual, and epistemic traditions held by black South Carolinians. In addition to her dissertation, Moore created thefolk in 2020, a digital archive dedicated to highlighting black southern culture both past and present.
Christina J. Thomas
Dr. Christina J. Thomas is the 2023-2025 Mellon Visiting Scholar at the Margaret Walker Center. A historian of the nineteenth and twentieth century African American experience, Dr. Thomas’s broad research interests include the history of Black girls and Black women, civil rights, and biography. Her current research project examines the early history of Friends of Children of Mississippi and the continued struggle for education in the Mississippi Movement during the late 1960s. Dr. Thomas is also committed to community archiving, oral history, and digital humanities. Dr. Thomas is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she received her Ph.D. in History. She also attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Messiah University.
AYAH NURIDDIN
Ayah Nuriddin is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton. She has a Ph.D. in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University. She also holds an M.A. in History and an MLS from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.A. in International Relations and History from American University. Her work examines how African Americans navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism in relation to struggles for racial justice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Sarah Bruno
Dr. Sarah Bruno is the Diasporas Solidarity Lab Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2024) and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Her research and art lie at the intersections of ethnography, performance, diaspora, and digitality. She is currently writing her first manuscript, Black Rican Dexterity where she uses the Afro-Puerto Rican genre of bomba as a site and method in constructing a cartography of Black Puerto Rican femme feeling throughout history. Dr. Bruno was a Mellon ACLS Dissertation Fellow in 2020-2021 and the 2020 awardee of the Association of Black Anthropologists Vera Green Prize for Public Anthropology. Bruno was the 2021-2022 ACLS Emerging Voices Race and Digital Technologies postdoctoral fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute and in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.