Program in African American History: Fellows

Our fellows include the nation’s most prominent scholars of African American literature, history, and the social life of the period before 1900. Their work in the collections of the Library Company has produced scores of acclaimed books and articles.

Postdoctoral Fellow

McCann_Alison

Alison McCann

PhD Candidate, The University of Miami

Until Freedom Be Done: African American Place Making, 1790-1880 

Postdoctoral Fellow

Maginn_Andy

Andrew Maginn

Assistant Professor, Middle Tennessee State University

United States Recognition of Haitian Sovereignty: A Civil War Solution 

Dissertation Fellow

Walters_Kelly

Kelly Walters

PhD Candidate, New York University & Associate Professor, Parsons School of Design at The New School

Black (Type) 

2026–2027

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellows 

Andrew Maginn, Assistant Professor, Middle Tennessee State University 
United States Recognition of Haitian Sovereignty: A Civil War Solution 

Alison McCann, PhD Candidate, The University of Miami 
Until Freedom Be Done: African American Place Making, 1790-1880 

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellow 

Kelly Walters, PhD Candidate, New York University & Associate Professor, Parsons School of Design at The New School 
Black (Type) 

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows 

Katherine Burns, Early Career Researcher 
Beautiful Lessons: Recovering the Bustill Women and their Activist Networks 

Dexter Gabriel, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut, Storrs 
The British Emigration Scheme and African American Emigration to the Caribbean 

Taylor M. Garrison, PhD Candidate, William & Mary 
“And his Wife”: The Multiple Meanings of Slave Marriage in the United States, 1800-1865 

Janice Yu, Independent Researcher 
Conditions of Appearance: The Scopic Regime of Domestic Slavery 

Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar Short-Term Fellow

Angelica Williams, Graduate Student, University of South Carolina 
Liberty in Ink: Bondage and Freedom at the Press 

Samuel Rhoads Short-Term Fellow

Christina Jones, Graduate Student, Howard University 
Enslaved Women’s Resistance through Food on Southern Antebellum Plantations 

Endowed Fellow in African American History

Andrew Wildermuth, Research Associate, University of Erlangen–Nuremberg 
American Primordial: Origin and Originality in Liberia and Deutschamerika 

Walter J. Miller Short-Term Fellow

Susan Goodier, Independent Historian 
Dignity in Freedom: The Life and Advocacy of Louisa Jacobs 

Dr. Richard S. Newman Short-Term Fellow

Kathryn Angelica, Assistant Professor, Purdue University Fort Wayne 
“For the Relief of Misery and Sin”: Creating, Maintaining, and Defending African American Institutions for the Vulnerable 

2025–2026

Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Dissertation Fellow in African American History

Casey Ellis Johnson, PhD Candidate, Indiana University-Bloomington
Borders as Both Barriers and Conduits: How Black Organizations Transcended the US-Canadian Divide

Justin P. Jones, PhD Candidate, Vanderbilt University
America’s Most Wanted: Revolutionary Privateers and the Illegal Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar Short-Term Fellow

Ywone Edwards-Ingram, Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University
Enslaved and Free Coachmen in Cities and Towns

Samuel Rhoads Short-Term Fellow

Simone Gulliver, PhD Student, University of Pennsylvania
‘Are Not the Black Berries Culled?’: Reading Interracial Encounters in New York City Trial Pamphlets, 1800-1820

Endowed Fellow in African American History

Jessica Leigh Hester, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
‘From the burying ground down town’: Grave Robbing, Racial Politics, and Freedom Work in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.

Walter J. Miller Short-Term Fellow

Alison McCann, PhD Candidate, The University of Miami
Until Freedom Be Done: African American Place-making in Liberia, 1790-1880

Dr. Richard S. Newman Short-Term Fellow

Rachel E. Walker, Associate Professor, University of Hartord
Free Radicals: Fringe Thinkers and the Fight for Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America

2024–2025

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow

Jake Nussbaum, independent scholar, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (PhD in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania)
Beyond Time: Experiments in Performance and Abolition, Philadelphia

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellows

Jorden E. Sanders, PhD Candidate, Department of English, Rutgers University
Un/Booked and Un/Bound: Retuning the Human in the Soundscape of Early African American Writing

Hampton Smith, PhD Candidate, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Making against Exploitation: Artisanry and Abolition towards the Black Atlantic Commons, 1791–1890

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Erica Duncan, PhD Candidate, Department of History, New York University
Childish Freedoms: Black Children and the Making of Freedom in South Carolina and the Bahamas

Marcus Nevius, Associate Professor, Kinder Institute and Department of History, University of Missouri
Internal Enemy of the Most Alarming Kind: Marronage and the Political Economy of Fear in the British Atlantic in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Chinaza Amaeze Okoli, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Eastern Kentucky University
Popular Performance Cultures and Black Atlantic Literature, 1750–1830

Gabrielle Straughn, PhD student, Department of History, University of California, Irvine
Mixed-Race Women’s Identities in the United States, 1776–1861 

2023–2024

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow

Samuel Davis, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Texas Christian University
Antislavery Conquest: Colonization, Removal, and Free-Soil Politics

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellow

Charlette Caldwell, PhD Candidate and Provost Diversity Fellow, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
The Crucible of the Freedom Church: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Culture of Building in the United States, 1790s–1930s

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Julia Bernier, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Washington & Jefferson College
All on Board: Slavery and Shipping on the Brig Orleans

Michael Hines, Assistant Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education
“Admirably Fitted for a Teacher”: Peter Williams Cassey, the Phoenixonian Institute, and Transcontinental Black Activism in Education, 1862–1878

Ronald Angelo Johnson, Associate Professor and the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History, Baylor University
Mutual Entanglements: Transracial Ties between Haitians and Revolutionary Americans

Janell B. Pryor, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Howard University, and Assistant Professor of Visual Culture, Bowie State University
“An Artist of Uncommon Ability”: David Bustill Bowser’s Artistic Production in Philadelphia, 1850–1900

2022–2023

NEH Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Fellow in African American History

April Logan, Associate Professor, Department of English, Salisbury University
Dark Comedy: Satire and Cultural Alienation in African American Literature

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellow

Halle-Mackenzie Ashby, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
Bound by the Womb: Reproduction, Kinship and Freedom in Barbados

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Kathryn Angelica, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Connecticut
A Nexus of 19th C Activism: The Lifelong Struggle of Eight Women Reformers

Wendy Raphael Roberts, Associate Professor, Department of English, University at Albany, SUNY
Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poetic Worlds

Mikala Stokes, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Northwestern University
Born of ‘Hardship, Trial, and Suffering:’ Black Men, Family, and Activism, 1820–1861

Ben Wright, Associate Professor, Department of History, The University of Texas at Dallas
Empires of Souls: The United States, Britain, and West African Colonization

2021–2022

Program in African American History awards paused for 2021–2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2020–2021

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow

April Logan, Associate Professor, Department of English, Salisbury University
Staging Mother Tongues: Black Women Writers’ Politics of Performance, 1845–1900s

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellow

Umniya Najaer, PhD Candidate, Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford University
Knotted Maternity, Infanticide and the Infant’s Corpse: Imagining Enslaved Women’s Reproductive Lives

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Colin Anderson, PhD Candidate, Department of American Studies, George Washington University
The Racial and Spatial Politics of 19th-Century American Sheet Music and Song Sheets, 1840–1900

Amanda McGee, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Arkansas
Abolition’s Informal Gatekeepers: The Role of County Courts in the Making of Pennsylvania’s ‘Free’ Border

Cynthia Patterson, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of South Florida
Yours for God, The Race and the ‘Review’: Women Contributors to the A.M.E. Church Review 1884–1924

Tiffany Player, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Africana Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
‘What Are We Going to Do for Ourselves?’: African American Women and the Politics of Slavery from the Antebellum Era to the Great Depression

2019–2020

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow

Tara Bynum, Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies Department, Hampshire College
Reading Pleasures

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellow

Brandi Waters, PhD Candidate in History and African American History, Yale University
Debating ‘defects’: Slavery, Disability, and Legal Medicine in Late Colonial Caribbean Colombia

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Faith Barrett, Department of English, Duquesne University
Let Music Rise from Every Tongue: Reading and Writing Poetry in Antebellum African American Communities

Bianca Dang, PhD Candidate in History, Yale University
“This country is exceedingly fertile”: Women’s Landholding, Political Contestations, and Haitian and African American Visions of Rural Autonomy, 1818–1868

Shennette Garrett-Scott, Department of History, University of Mississippi
Domesticating Racial Capitalism: Freedwomen and Industrial Sewing Schools, 1863–1872

Susan Goodier, Department of History, SUNY Oneonta
The St. Thomas Sanitary Committee Fair of 1864 and Louisa Jacobs

2018–2019

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow

Jessica Millward, Department of History, University of California, Irvine
Broken Black Bodies: African American Women and Domestic Violence in the Post-Civil War South

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellow

Denise Burgher, PhD Candidate in English Literature, University of Delaware
Redeeming the Banished Spirit: Naming the Theological Praxis in Nineteenth-Century Black Women’s Writing

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Alisha Knight, Department of English, Washington College
Black Books Matter: African American Book Publishing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Arlisha Norwood, PhD Candidate in History, Howard University
“To Never Truck with No Man”: Single African American Women in the Post-Emancipation Era

Maria Ryan, PhD Candidate in Music, University of Pennsylvania
Hearing Power, Sounding Freedom: Black Practices of Listening, Music-Making, and Ear-Training in the British Colonial Caribbean, 1807–1860

Kay Wright Lewis, Department of History, Howard University
The Children of Africa Have Been Called

2017–2018

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellows

Cheryl Hicks, Department of History, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Black Enchantress: Hannah Elias, Interracial Sex, Murder, and Civil Rights in Jim Crow New York

Nazera Sadiq Wright, Department of History, University of Kentucky
African American Women Writers and Research Libraries

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Lucien Holness, PhD Candidate in History, University of Maryland, College Park
Between North and South, East and West: The Antislavery Movement in Southwestern Pennsylvania

Lacey Hunter, Department of History, Drew University
Nineteenth Century African American Women Intellectuals and the American Jeremiad

Myrna Sheldon, Department of Classics and World Religions, Ohio University
The Ontology of a Mixed-Race Woman

Wendy Wilson Falls, Department of Africana Studies, Lafayette College
Indian Ocean Maritime Labor, Black Sailors, and American Merchants: The Port of Philadelphia

2016–2017

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellows

Vanessa Holden, Department of History, Michigan State University
Forming Intimacies: Queer Kinship and Resistance in the Antebellum American Atlantic

Rashauna Johnson, Department of History, Dartmouth College
“A Looking Glass for the World”: Slavery, Immigration, and Overlapping Diasporas in the U.S. South

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellows

Nakia Parker, PhD Candidate in History, University of Texas, Austin
Trails of Tears and Freedom: Slavery, Migration, and Emancipation in the Southwest Borderlands, 1830–1887

Crystal Webster, PhD Candidate in Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Fugitive Play, Discursive Resistance: The Politics of Black Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Tara Bynum, Department of English, Rutgers University
Reading Pleasures

James Ford, Department of English, Occidental College
Disheveling the Origins: Impossible Canonicity and African Diasporic Writing

Damon Turner, PhD Candidate in History, Morgan State University
The Reinventing of an Abolitionist: The Transatlantic Study of the United States, Sierra Leone, England, and the Quest for an Omaginary Homeland in Africa through the Eyes of Paul Cuffe, 1776–1817

2015–2016

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow

Jessica Marie Johnson, Department of History, Michigan State University
Practicing Freedom: Intimacy, Kinship, and Property in Atlantic New Orleans, 1685–1810

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellow

Michael Dickinson, PhD Candidate in History, University of Delaware
Surviving Slavery: Oppression and Social Rebirth in the Urban British Atlantic, 1680–1807

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Julia Bernier, PhD Candidate in Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
A Papered Freedom: Self-Purchase and Compensated Manumission in the Antebellum United States

Daina Ramey Berry, Department of African and African American Studies, University of Texas, Austin
Ghost Values of the Domestic Cadaver Slave Trade

Dexter Gabriel, PhD Candidate in History, State University of New York, Stony Brook
A West Indian Jubilee in America

Holly Pinheiro, PhD Candidate in History, University of Iowa
Men of Color to Arms!: Race, Manhood, and Citizenship during the Civil War Era

2014–2015

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellows

Kabria Baumgartner, Department of History, College of Wooster
In Pursuit of Knowledge: African American Women and Educational Activism in America’s Republic

Aston Gonzalez, Department of History, University of Michigan
Designing Humanity: African American Activist Art, 1830–1880

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellows

Emahunn Campbell, PhD Candidate in Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
The Imagination and Construction of the Black Criminal in American Literature, 1741–1910

Emily Owens, PhD Candidate in African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Fantasies of Consent: Black Women’s Sexual Labor in 19th c. New Orleans

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Westenley Alcenat, PhD Candidate in History, Columbia University
Escape to Zion: Black Emigration and the Elusive Quest for Citizenship, 1816–1868

Frederick Knight, Department of History, Morehouse College
Black Elders in Early America

Tiffany Player, PhD Candidate in History, Washington University in St. Louis
Black Women and the Politics of Slavery from the Antebellum through the Great Depression

Selena Sanderfer, Department of History, Western Kentucky University
Tennessee’s Postwar Black Emigration Movements, 1868–1888

2013–2014

Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Short-Term Fellows in African American History

Katie Johnston, PhD Candidate in History, Columbia University
The Experience of Hot Climates: Health, Race and the Body in the British Atlantic World

Anna Lawrence, Department of History, Fairfield University
Jarena Lee’s Calling

Mary Maillard, independent scholar, Vancouver, British Columbia
Lulu and Genie: The Letters of Louisa Jacobs to Eugenie Webb, 1879–1911

Marie Stango, PhD Candidate in History, University of Michigan
Antislavery and Colonization: African American Women in Nineteenth Century West Africa

2012–2013

Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Short-Term Fellows in African American History

Marcus A. Allen, PhD Candidate in History, Morgan State University
Institutionalizing Black Capitalism: An Examination of the African American Depositors at the Savings Bank of Baltimore, 1850–1900

Christopher Bonner, PhD Candidate in History, Yale University
Making Citizenship Meaningful: Language, Power, and Belonging in African American Activism, 1827–1868

Abigail Cooper, PhD Candidate in History, University of Pennsylvania
“Until I reach My Home”: Inside the Refugee Camps of the American Civil War

Brooke N. Newman, Department of History, Virginia Commonwealth University
Island Masters: Gender, Race, and Power in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean

2011–2012

Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Short-Term Fellows in African American History

David Crosby, independent scholar, Jackson, Mississippi
An Annotated Critical Edition of Anthony Benezet’s Antislavery Writings

Aston Gonzales, PhD Candidate in History, University of Michigan
Black Activist Art in Philadelphia, 1820–1860

Lori Leavell, PhD Candidate in English, Emory University
Imagining a Future South: David Walker’s Appeal and Antebellum American Literature

Anna Stewart, PhD Candidate in English, University of Texas at Austin
Lives Reconstructed: Slave Narratives and Freedmen’s Education

2010–2011

Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Short-Term Fellows in African American History

Ric N. Caric, Department of Government and Regional Analysis, Morehead State University
Occupied by Blackness: Early Blackface Minstrelsy in Philadelphia

James W. Cook, Jr., Department of History, University of Michigan
The Lost Black Generation: African American Performers and the Making of Global Mass Culture

Peter Reed, Department of English, University of Mississippi
Dancing on the Volcano: The Haitian Revolution and American Performance Cultures, 1790–1865

Terri Snyder, American Studies, California State University, Fullerton
Suicide, Slavery and the Rise of Abolitionism in North America

2009–2010

Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Short-Term Fellows in African American History

Ronald Johnson, PhD Candidate in History, Purdue University
In Close Alliance; How the Early American Republic and Revolutionary Saint-Domingue Made Their Way in a Hostile Atlantic World

Alice Taylor, Department of History, University of Western Ontario
Selling Abolitionism: The Commercial, Material and Social World of the Boston Antislavery Fair, 1834–1858

Beverly Tomek, Department of History, Wharton County Junior College
Pennsylvania Hall: The Lynching of a Building

Andrew Diemer, PhD Candidate in History, Temple University
Black Nativism: African American Politics and Nationalism in Antebellum Baltimore and Philadelphia, 1817–1863

2008–2009

Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Short-Term Fellows in African American History

Corey Brooks, PhD Candidate in History, University of California, Berkeley
Building an Antislavery House: Political Abolitionists and Congress, 1835–1861

Martyn J. Powell, Department of History, University of Wales Aberystwyth
The White Slave Trade: Print Culture and Irish Emigration to American in the Late 18th Century

Derrick R. Spires, PhD Candidate in English, Vanderbilt University
Reimagining a “Beautiful but Baneful Object”: Black Writers’ Theories of Citizenship and Nation in the Antebellum United States

Kaye Wise Whitehead, PhD Candidate in Language, Literacy, and Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Washing Her Bowl: Using Diary Entries to Reconstruct the Life of a 19th-Century Free Black Woman