Blog Announcement: New Editors and Bloggers

The editing team of Black Perspectives is excited to begin the new year! Thank you for supporting us over these past few years! We extend our sincere thanks to the talented writers who contribute excellent pieces to the blog; participate in our forums and roundtables; and review books for us. As we enter a new year and the Spring semester, we look forward to expanding the content of the blog, highlighting a wide array of fields, methods, and methodologies.

The new year also brings a few changes to the blog’s editing team and roster of contributors. Under senior editor Tyler Parry‘s leadership, we are excited to add a new lead associate editor and assistant editor to our already stellar team! We have also added eight new bloggers who will regularly contribute essays to Black Perspectives. Please join us in welcoming them to the team!

New Lead Associate Editor

Robert Greene II is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Claflin University. Dr. Greene serves as book reviews editor and blogger for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians. He also serves as Chief Instructor for the South Carolina Progressive Network’s Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights. Currently, Dr. Greene is co-editing, with Tyler D. Parry, a collection of essays on the history of African Americans at the University of South Carolina. He is also working on his first book, examining the role of Southern African Americans in the Democratic Party from 1964 through the 1990s. Finally, Dr. Greene has published several articles and book chapters on the intersection of memory, politics, and African American history, and has written for numerous popular publications, including The Nation, Oxford American, Dissent, Scalawag, Jacobin, In These Times, Politico, and The Washington Post. Follow him on twitter @robgreeneII.

New Assistant Editor

Ryan Huey is finishing up his dissertation on policing and the counterculture in Michigan to earn his PhD in history from Michigan State University. He has been copyediting pieces for Black Perspectives for over two years and is now also serving as an assistant editor. Ryan has contributed written pieces to the Lansing State Journal, Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism in the Twentieth Century digital archive, and the H-Net Book Channel.

New Contributors

Shaun Armstead is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her dissertation, “Imagined Solidarities: Black Liberal Internationalism and the National Council of Negro Women’s Journey from Afro-Asian to Pan-African Unity, 1935 to 1975,” charts the understudied international activities of one of the largest African American women’s organizations in U.S. history. She considers their efforts to unite with women of color outside the western world to reimagine liberal internationalism as an anti-racist, anticolonial, and antisexist global order. Her work is at the intersection of histories on women’s internationalism, Black internationalism, and Global South Feminisms during the twentieth century.

Julia Wallace Bernier is an Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies at the University of North Alabama. She received a PhD in African American Studies from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017. Her work focuses on the lives of enslaved people, slavery, and abolition in the nineteenth century United States. Before her current position, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for the Study of Slavery at Georgetown University and is also interested in studying and addressing slavery’s afterlife on university campuses and beyond. She is currently working on her first book, Freedom’s Currency, which is a history of self-purchase in the United States and will be published by Yale University Press. Follow her on Twitter @jwbernier.

Marius Kothor is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history at Yale University. She has broad research interests in 20th century African history, gender, and Black internationalism. Her dissertation project has been award fellowships from the Fulbright (IIE) program, the Social Science Research Council (IDRF), and the Fulbright-Hays (DDRA) Program. She has published essays in a number of venues including: The New York Times, The History News Network, and The Professor Is In blog. You can follow her on Twitter @Mariuskothor.

Holly Pinheiro received his bachelor’s degree (2008) from the University of Central Florida. Later earned his master’s degree (2010) and doctoral degrees (2017) from the University of Iowa. He is an Assistant Professor at Augusta University in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. Counter to the national narrative which championed the patriotic manhood of soldiering from the Civil War through the 1930s, his research reveals that African American veterans and their families’ military experience were much more fraught. Economic and social instability introduced by military service resonated for years and even generations after soldiers left the battlefield. He has published articles in edited volumes and academic journals, in and outside of the United States. His manuscript, The Families’ Civil War, which is under contract with The University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series. The manuscript highlights how racism, in and outside of military service, impacted the bodies, economies, family structures, and social spaces of African Americans long after the war ended. He has also started preliminary work for a new monograph that will examine all Pennsylvania born soldiers who trained at Camp William Penn. Follow him on Twitter @PhUsct.

Jayson Maurice Porter is an environmental historian of Mexico and the Americas focusing on agrochemicals, rural food deserts, and Black ecologies. He is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but grew up between Tucson, Arizona and Jackson, Mississippi. He graduated from Millsaps College where he studied philosophy, history, and environmental sciences. Before moving to Chicago, Jayson was a graduate assistant editor of the Journal of the Early Republic and a public arts educator for several museums, Stop Hunger Now, and COCOON public space sculpture in Jackson, Mississippi and Paris, France. Jayson is now a PhD candidate of history at Northwestern University, where he is writing an environmental history of agrochemicals for and made from the cultivation of oilseeds—sesame, cotton, coconuts, opium, and marijuana—which connects accounts of ecological violence, food insecurity, and environmental justice in Guerrero and Sinaloa, 1920-1980. As a COMEXUS Fulbright Scholar (2019-2020), he was a visiting scholar for the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas affiliated with the Derechos Humanos de la Ciudad de México. Jayson is an environmentalist specialist and fellow at Noria Mexico and Central America, where he edits a series called “Violence Takes Place: Land, Markets, and Power in Rural Mexico.” He has written in other media platforms, such as OkayAfrica, Age of Revolutions, Ecos, and Discurso, and is an Editorial Board member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). Lastly, Jayson co-authored Black Perspectives’s first Spanish language article in the 2020 “Black Ecologies” series, and he is excited to bring that energy all of 2021. Follow him on Twitter @RogueChieftan.

Dan Royles is Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University, where he teaches courses on U.S., African American, public, and oral history. He is the author of To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS (UNC Press, 2020), which places African American AIDS activists in the context of much longer histories of black health activism, and the way that African Americans have framed their fight for inclusion and equality in the United States in relation to other struggles throughout the African Diaspora and global south. He is also the creator of the African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project and the African American AIDS History Project, a digital archive of Black communities’ responses to HIV/AIDS. He is currently working on an intellectual, social, and cultural biography of Claude Brown, author of the 1965 autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land. He also contributes regularly to Vitae, the academic jobs web portal from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and to OutHistory. Follow him on Twitter @danroyles.

William Sturkey is an historian of Modern America who specializes in the history of race in the American South, with a particular interest in the histories of working-class racial minorities. He teaches courses on Modern American History, Southern History, the Civil Rights Movement, and the History of America in the 1960s. His first book, To Write in the Light of Freedom, is a co-edited collection of newspapers, essays, and poems produced by African American Freedom School students during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. His second book, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, is a biracial history of Southern Jim Crow that was published by Harvard University Press in March of 2019. Dr. Sturkey is currently working on a new project, tentatively titled To Be An American, which is a biography of the legendary Vietnam War hero Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez. Dr. Sturkey works with graduate students in all fields of Modern American History. He is currently advising the talented Jennifer Standish and Laura Woods. Dr. Sturkey also serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South and the UNC Program in the Humanities. He also serves an elected representative on the UNC Faculty Athletics Council. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he was named one of two faculty recipients of the university-wide UNC Diversity and Inclusion Award for “significant contribution, time and effort of Carolina community members towards advancing an inclusive climate for excellence in teaching, research, public service and academic endeavor.” Dr. Sturkey is also an engaged public scholar who regularly gives public lectures, appears in local and national media, and works with K-12 teachers. Follow him on Twitter @william_sturkey.

Crystal Lynn Webster is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Her research interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, and age. Her first monograph, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press, June 2021), is a social history of antebellum African American children and foregrounds their lives as fundamental to the North’s prolonged transition from slavery to freedom. She is currently researching and writing her second book through a long-term fellowship with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, tentatively titled Criminalizing Freedom: African Americans and the Making of Criminal Reform in Early America. Follow her on Twitter @Crystallynnweb.