Teaching

Teaching

Archiving Women and Slavery in Virginia

I discuss how I incorporate the digital humanities into my pedagogy in "Archiving Women and Slavery in Virginia," which is published in Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook. This handbook is a peer-reviewed open resource edited by Beth Fischer (Williams College Museum of Art) and Hannah Jacobs (Duke University Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab). Click here to read about how I designed a digital humanities project for my class, Women and Slavery in the Black Atlantic.


Teaching Philosophy

As an Afro-Caribbean woman and first generation American, legacies of slavery, colonialism, and poverty have left clear imprints on my life and teaching. The connections between race, gender, diaspora, and lived experiences became tangible for me as an undergraduate student when I began to internalize how historical events have left palpable impacts on contemporary institutions and marginalized populations. My professors’ abilities to concretize course material not only deepened my knowledge, but also led me to a greater understanding of how to productively engage students in historical inquiry. As a result, I use a constructivist pedagogy that situates students as active participants with a shared responsibility in the learning process.

Three core principles underline my teaching. First, I prompt students to recognize the lasting significance of concepts we explore in class. Second, I cultivate students’ ability to synthesize information using a variety of sources and digital humanities tools. Third, I create opportunities for students to have hands-on experience with archival research. I structure readings, class discussions, and written assignments such that students interpret diverse sources, thereby offering multiple entry points into course content. In sum, my pedagogical strategies ensure that new interpretations of race, gender, and systems of oppression are accessible to students as they historicize the processes that facilitate and impede social change.


Course Descriptions

Slavery and colonialism in the african diaspora

This course includes a study abroad component, similarly to my Women and Slavery in the Black Atlantic course.

The histories, politics, and cultures of various regions have given shape to the global African diaspora, at times producing continuities and at others, points of departure. Two constants, however, are the prevalence of colonialism and slavery, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean. This class will examine the impacts that colonialism and slavery have had on colonized peoples, as well as the linkages between African and Caribbean history, by traveling to Barbados, a former British colony. Particular points for consideration include enslavement in the Caribbean, decolonization, post-colonialism, and contemporary legacies of colonialism and slavery, including movements for reparations.

OBJECTIVES

  • Identify the historical processes that contributed to the spread of slavery and colonialism throughout the African Diaspora

  • Analyze the legacies of slavery and colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean

  • Develop familiarity with decolonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean

  • Use interdisciplinary methods such as literary analysis and the digital humanities to examine the 20th and 21st century impacts of slavery and colonialism


Women and Slavery in the Black Atlantic

Read students’ reflections about our week-long study abroad experience in Barbados here.

From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, over 12 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of those who survived the Middle Passage, fewer than 500,000 arrived in the United States; the vast majority were dispersed throughout the Caribbean and South America. The experiences of enslaved women, as well as the relationships between free and enslaved women, are as diverse as the African diaspora. Given the broad geographical scope of Africans’ arrivals in the New World, this course will offer a comparative examination of women and slavery in the Black Atlantic. Topics for consideration include black women’s gendered experiences of slavery, white women’s roles in slave societies, and women abolitionists. The course will also examine how African and European conceptions of gender shaped the institution of slavery in the New World. Particular attention will be devoted to slavery in West Africa, Barbados, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States.

objectives

  • Identify the historical processes that contributed to the formation of the Black Atlantic

  • Compare and contrast women’s roles in sustaining and/or abolishing slavery throughout the Black Atlantic

  • Explain the strategies that African diasporic women used to navigate their enslavement

  • Develop familiarity with archival research methods and archival theory

  • Synthesize primary and secondary sources about women’s experiences of slavery


Black Radical Women

African-diasporic women have consistently imagined new futures in their pursuits of freedom and justice. In so doing, they have resisted patriarchy, racial violence, and state-sanctioned oppression. This course will offer an introduction to the theories and activism that have characterized Black women’s radicalism from the nineteenth century to the present. By examining sources including writings by Frances Harper; articles by Claudia Jones; songs by Miriam Makeba; contemporary, digital activist campaigns; and more, students will evaluate how Black women have critiqued racism, sexism, and class exploitation. The course will also investigate how women navigated racial, gender, and class dynamics within activist organizations. Key topics for consideration include abolition, suffrage, Garveyism, Négritude, the anti-apartheid movement, Black Power, and #BlackLivesMatter. Ultimately, students will analyze Black women’s roles in movements for Black liberation, feminism, and Black internationalism.

Note: In any other semester, this course may be structured a bit differently. Yet, in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, social unrest, and recent white supremacist assaults on American democracy, this course offers a unique opportunity to contextualize the contemporary moment. That being said, this iteration of Black Radical Women will focus primarily on three key themes: Black women’s critiques of American democracy and other political systems; the criminalization of Black people in general and Black activists in particular; and the persistence of, as well as overlap between, state violence and mob violence.

Objectives

  • Develop familiarity with key topics and debates within the Black radical tradition

  • Identify the historical processes that have shaped Black women’s activism and theorizing

  • Describe the different forms that Black women’s radicalism has taken throughout the African diaspora from the nineteenth century to the present

  • Compare and contrast the continuities and points of departure between Black women’s radicalism across time and space

  • Synthesize primary and secondary sources about Black women’s theories and activism


African American Intellectual History

Since their earliest arrivals in the New World, African Americans crafted liberatory ideas as they articulated a desire for equality, justice, and self-determination. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black intellectual thought took shape against the backdrop of processes of enslavement, emancipation, racial violence, and state-sanctioned oppression. Indeed, the discursive spaces that black political thinkers created became major sites of knowledge production and provided momentum for black mobilization. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), this course will probe landmark texts by and about African American thinkers including Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X., and Angela Davis. Students will evaluate historical perspectives on topics including racial uplift, feminism, black nationalism, and Pan-Africanism. They will also identify major debates that shaped the development of African American intellectual history.

Objectives

  • Analyze major debates that shaped African American intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

  • Identify how Black women thinkers, in addition to their more popular male contemporaries, influenced the trajectory of African American intellectual history

  • Understand the breadth and diversity of African American political discourse

  • Synthesize primary and secondary sources about Black intellectuals in the United States and their work

  • Develop familiarity with historical research methods


Introduction to Black women’s history

What happens when American history is narrated by Black women and through Black women's experiences? How might we understand US history if we locate Black women at the center rather than the peripheries? These questions provide the guiding framework for this course. This course will trace African American women's history from slavery to the present. Particular attention will be devoted to Black women's labor, activism, intellectual thought, and cultural productions. We will also consider how race, gender, class, and sexuality have functioned in Black women's lives.

objectives

  • Summarize how Black women’s labor, activism, intellectual thought, and cultural productions have impacted United States history from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries

  • Analyze the relationships between race, gender, and class

  • Apply historical modes of analysis to the study of Black women in the United States

  • Synthesize primary and secondary sources about Black women’s history

  • Develop digital literacy and familiarity with public history

  • Communicate historical knowledge to a non-specialist audience


history of the african american people to 1877

This course is an introduction to African American history from Africans’ earliest arrivals in the United States through Reconstruction. Drawing on primary and secondary sources including slave narratives, speeches, newspaper articles, and more, students will learn how to engage in historical analysis. Key topics for consideration include slavery, abolition, free Black communities, and Black resistance. Specific attention will be devoted to enslaved Black women’s experiences and Black women’s activism. Of particular significance will be Black people’s ongoing efforts to critique the limits of American democracy, claim their freedom, and exercise the rights of citizenship.

Objectives

  • Summarize how colonialism, capitalism, slavery, and anti-black racism have impacted United States history

  • Identify major figures, laws, and ideologies in African American history and explain their significance

  • Analyze the relationships between race, gender, and class

  • Apply historical modes of analysis to the study of Black people in the United States

  • Synthesize primary and secondary sources about African American history

  • Develop familiarity with archival research methods


history of the african american people since 1877

This course is an introduction to African American history from Reconstruction to Black Power. Drawing on primary and secondary sources including essays, interviews, speeches, newspaper articles, and more, students will learn how to engage in historical analysis. Key topics for consideration include Black organizing, Black intellectual thought, and Black radicalism. Specific attention will be devoted to Black women’s experiences and Black women’s activism. Of particular significance will be Black people’s ongoing efforts to critique the limits of American democracy, claim their freedom, and exercise the rights of citizenship.

Objectives

  • Summarize how anti-black racism Black activism have impacted United States history

  • Identify major figures, laws, and ideologies in African American history and explain their significance

  • Analyze the relationships between race, gender, and class

  • Apply historical modes of analysis to the study of Black people in the United States

  • Synthesize primary and secondary sources about African American history

  • Develop familiarity with archival research methods


History of the Civil Rights Movement

This course will examine the trajectory of the Civil Rights Movement by focusing on particular events, strategies, organizations, and political actors. After identifying the conditions that contributed to the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the course will trace the movement from the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board case to the rise of Black Power during the 1970s. The course will conclude by examining the relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

objectives

  • Explain the significance of various events, campaigns, Supreme Court decisions, executive orders, and legislation during the Civil Rights Movement

  • Identify key actors in the Civil Rights Movement and evaluate the narratives surrounding their activism

  • Differentiate between the ideologies supported by and strategies employed by various organizations, including but not limited to the NAACP, SNCC, the SCLC, CORE, and the BPP

  • Understand the roles that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches played in the Civil Rights Movement

  • Analyze the relationships between race, gender, sexuality, and the Civil Rights Movement

  • Consider the legacy and contemporary implications of the Civil Rights Movement


Introduction to Africana Studies

Keep up with us on Twitter using #afr10119.

 This course will introduce students to the interpretive value and real-world applicability of Africana Studies by examining global Black history and contemporary Black people’s experiences. It will interrogate the fundamental role of race in structuring the modern world by foregrounding African diasporan people’s history, politics, and cultural productions with a particular emphasis on the Americas and the Caribbean. This course will offer an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational grounding in the study of Black people.

 Objectives

  • Summarize how colonialism, capitalism, slavery, and anti-black racism have impacted African diasporan history

  • Identify major activists/thinkers in the African diaspora and explain their significance

  • Analyze the relationships between race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality

  • Apply interdisciplinary methods of analysis and techniques to the study of the African Diaspora


Thugs, Jezebels, and Contemporary Politics

See our collaborative website here and keep up with us on Twitter using #tjcp251.

In the months prior to the 2016 presidential election, race relations in the United States were propelled into the American public consciousness with great force, although race has continually exerted an omnipresent influence on contemporary politics. Beginning with Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, this course will survey how discourse on black femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and class has impacted American politics from 1991 to the present. Topics for consideration include welfare reform, reproductive justice, mass incarceration, backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency, and white nationalist support for Donald Trump. Readings will also consider how black activists, lawyers, journalists, and politicians have responded to and resisted racism and sexism in contemporary politics.

objectives

  • Explain how the relationship between race, gender, and class impacts American politics

  • Evaluate the racialized implications of various laws, policies, and programs

  • Recognize how conceptions of black masculinity and femininity shape contemporary politics

  • Interpret racialized and gendered language in political discourse


Black Women in the Americas and the Caribbean

This course will survey the historical, political, economic and socio-cultural realities that Black women in the Americas and the Caribbean have faced and continue to face. A variety of readings by and about Black women will highlight the ways in which race, class, and gender combine to operate in the lives of Black women. Special attention will be paid to Black women as laborers, Black women as political activists, and the various ways in which Black women in the Americas and the Caribbean experience race and gender.

objectives

  • Analyze the relationships between race, class, gender, and sexuality from the 1700s to the present

  • Consider how race and gender have jointly impacted social, economic, legal, and political systems in the global community

  • Understand the shared experiences and histories of black women through time and space

  • Examine the diversity of black women's lives through time and space


Women and Activism

This course will provide a historical overview of how women have influenced and engaged in various forms of activism, and will provide students a self-directed experiential learning opportunity. Students will evaluate the factors that have contributed to and impeded social change, and will then apply their knowledge by developing community action projects.

objectives

  • Explain how race, class, sexuality, religion, nationality, and other categories of identity have impacted women’s activism

  • Evaluate women activists' approaches to reproductive justice, the carceral state, electoral politics, and environmental justice

  • Identify and articulate the ideologies that have shaped women's activism

  • Apply activist strategies by designing and implementing a community action project


Teaching Experience

Washington and Lee University

  • Slavery and Colonialism in the African Diaspora. History Department. (Spring 2022)

  • History of the Civil Rights Movement. History Department. (Winter 2022)

  • Thugs, Jezebels, and Contemporary Politics. History Department. (Winter 2022)

  • Introduction to Black Women’s History. History Department. (Fall 2021)

  • History of the African American People since 1877. History Department. (Fall 2021)

  • African American Intellectual History. History Department. (Winter 2021)

  • Black Radical Women. History Department. (Winter 2021)

  • History of the African American People to 1877. History Department. (Fall 2020)

  • Women and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. History Department. (Fall 2020)

Davidson College

  • African American Intellectual History. Africana Studies Department. (Spring 2020)

  • Introduction to Africana Studies. Africana Studies Department. (Fall 2019)

  • Women and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Africana Studies Department. (Spring 2019)

  • Thugs, Jezebels, and Contemporary Politics. Africana Studies Department. (Fall 2018)

University of Cincinnati

  • Women and Activism. Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. (Spring 2017)

University of Massachusetts Amherst

  • History of the Civil Rights Movement [Online Course]. W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. (Winter 2017, Fall 2015)

  • Black Women in the Americas and the Caribbean. W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. (Spring 2016)

  • Introduction to African American History, 1619-1860. Teaching Assistant. W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. (Fall 2015)

  • Introduction to African American History, 1860-1954. Teaching Assistant. W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. (Spring 2015)

  • History of the Civil Rights Movement. Teaching Assistant. W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst. (Fall 2014)