Writing Family, Reconstructing Lives
MEET OUR PRESENTERS
Nathan Connolly
Nathan Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, where he occupies the Herbert Baxter Adams Chair and directs the program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship. He’s also one of four co-hosts on the weekly American History podcast BackStory. Connolly’s 2014 book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, received, among other awards, the Kenneth T. Jackson Book Award from the Urban History Association, the Bennett H. Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association, and the Liberty Legacy Foundation Book Award from the Organization of American Historians. He’s currently writing Four Daughters, a five-generation history of one working-class family whose aspirations and setbacks, between the 1890s and 1990s, took them between the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States.
Thulani Davis
Thulani Davis is a writer and scholar working in multiple disciplines. She is the author of six books including My Confederate Kinfolk and the novels 1959 and Maker of Saints, and several works of poetry. She is widely anthologized as a poet, particularly in connection to jazz. Davis wrote the scripts for the films Paid in Full (2002) and Maker of Saints (2013), now in development, as well as several award-winning PBS documentaries, including Louis Massiah’s W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1996), and Massiah’s In Ragtime: James Reese Europe (2011). Davis developed the concept for Blackside’s I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts (1999). She wrote the libretti for Anthony Davis’ Amistad (1997) and X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X (1985), and Anne LeBaron’s The E. & O. Line (1989). Her newest opera is The Little Rock Nine (2017). Davis is a past recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award, a Pew Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York City, among other awards. She is the first woman to win a Grammy for liner notes (1993) and the opera X is a past Grammy nominee (1993). Davis was honored by the Veterans Committee of the Congressional Black Caucus in 2011 for work on President Obama’s first national monument designation-- Fort Monroe, VA, site of the 1619 landing of Africans. She has been named a Distinguished Alumna of Barnard College, and received her PhD from NYU, where she was awarded the Lerner Prize in American Studies. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow at the University of Wisconsin.
Thavolia Glymph
Thavolia Glymph, professor of history and law, studies the U.S. South with a focus on nineteenth century social history. She has published numerous articles and essays and is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era, University of North Carolina Press, November 2019). She is co-editor of two volumes of the award-winning documentary series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 and is currently completing a book manuscript titled African American Women and Children Refugees in the Civil War: A History the Making of Freedom, supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Glymph is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, an elected member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society, and incoming president of the Southern Historical Association.
Kerri Greenidge
Kerri Greenidge is the author of the Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, published by Norton in November 2019. The book, a biography of African-American activist, William Monroe Trotter, explores the history of racial thought and African American political radicalism in New England at the turn of the century. Greenidge currently directs American Studies in Tufts’ Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, and is co-director of the African American Trail Project. Greenidge received her Doctorate in American Studies from Boston University, and her scholarship explores the role of African-American literature in the creation of radical Black political consciousness. Her previous work includes historical research for the Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African-American Literature, the Oxford African American Studies Center, and PBS. For nine years she worked as a historian for Boston African American National Historical Site in Boston, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006).
Leslie M. Harris
Leslie M. Harris, Professor of History at Northwestern University, is the author or co-editor of three award-winning books: In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (University of Chicago, 2003); co-editor with Ira Berlin of Slavery in New York (The New Press, 2005), which accompanied the groundbreaking New-York Historical Society exhibition of the same name; and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (University of Georgia Press, 2014), co-edited with Daina Ramey Berry, in collaboration with Telfair Museums' Owens-Thomas House. From 2004 to 2011, she co-founded and co-directed the Transforming Community Project (TCP) at Emory University, which used history to engage members of the university community in dialogue, research and teaching on racial and other forms of human diversity. In 2011, the Transforming Community Project organized the first international conference on the history of slavery in higher education. Harris has recently completed Slavery and Sexuality: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (University of Georgia, 2018), with Daina Ramey Berry; and Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia, 2019) with James T. Campbell and Alfred L. Brophy. She is currently working on a book on late-twentieth century New Orleans, entitled “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.”
Martha Hodes
Martha Hodes is Professor of History at New York University, and has taught as a Fulbright scholar in Germany and as a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. In addition to Mourning Lincoln, she is the author of The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century, which was a finalist for the Lincoln Book Prize, and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History. At NYU, Hodes teaches courses on race, the Civil War, and the nineteenth-century United States, as well as courses devoted to the craft of history-writing, including Writing the Civil War, History and Storytelling, Biography and History, Reconstructing Lives, and Experimental History. She is a winner of NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award. Hodes holds degrees from Bowdoin College, Harvard University, and Princeton University, and has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Whiting Foundation. She has served as a consultant for documentaries, television, radio, and museum exhibitions, and is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians.
Martha S. Jones
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Professor Jones is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900(University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America(Cambridge University Press in 2018,) winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Foundation award for the best book on the history of civil rights. She is also a co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women(University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Professor Jones frequently writes for broader publics at outlets that include the Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is currently completing Vanguard: A History of African American Women’s Politics–to be published in 2020 in conjunction with the 19thAmendment’s centennial –and is at work on a biography of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney.Professor Jones serves as a Co-President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and a member of the Organization of American Historians Executive Board.
Tiya Miles
Radcliffe Institute is Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a public historian, academic historian, and creative writer whose work explores the intersections of African American, Native American and women’s histories. Her temporal and geographical zones of greatest interest include the nineteenth-century U.S. South, Midwest, and West. Miles offers courses on African American women, Native American women, abolitionist women, and “Black Indian” histories and identities. She has become increasingly engaged in environmental humanities questions and ways of articulating and enlivening African American environmental consciousness. Miles is the author of five award-winning books, including Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. Her prize-winning scholarly articles and essays explore nineteenth-century women’s struggles against injustice, conjoined Black and Native histories & literatures, public histories of plantations, and southern coastal environments. With the literary critic Sharon P. Holland, Miles co-edited a collection of essays on Afro-Native lives titled Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (2006). Miles is a recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2011-2016) Her newest book, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (New Press, 2017), received the Merle Curti Award in Social History and James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations from the Organization of American Historians, the James Bradford Best Biography Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction, an American Book Award, and a Frederick Douglass Prize. Miles holds an AB in Afro-American Studies from Harvard University, an MA in Women’s Studies from Emory University, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. She taught on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years, where she served as Chair of the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies, Director of the Native American Studies Program, and founding director of ECO Girls (Environmental and Cultural Opportunities for Girls in Urban Southeast Michigan.
Dawn Peterson
Dawn Peterson is an independent scholar specializing in Native American history, women’s history, and the history of racial slavery in North America. She received her PhD in American Studies from New York University and her BA from Barnard College. She is the author of Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Harvard University Press, 2017).