Blog Announcements: Meet the Editing Team!
The editing team of Black Perspectives is excited to begin the next academic year! Thank you for supporting us over these 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 the Fall 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. We’re thrilled to share the news that Robert Greene II, the senior editor of the blog, will be joined by three new senior editors: Reighan Gillam, Tejai Beulah Howard, and Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. We are also excited to announce the addition of a new managing editor (Joshua Crutchfield), a new associate editor (Lacey Hunter), and a new book review editor (Adam Lee Cilli). Tiana Wilson continues as a managing editor, Guy Emerson Mount continues as an associate editor, and Gloria Ashaolu continues as assistant editor. Please join us in celebrating this year’s editing team of Black Perspectives!
Senior Editors
Tejai Beulah Howard, Ph. D. is assistant professor of history and African American religious and ethical studies at Methodist Theological School in Ohio in Delaware, Ohio and a certified spiritual director. Her research interests include Black religious intellectuals, gender and sexuality in U.S. history, African American music, spirituality, and social movements, and race/ethnicity studies. Outside of teaching, she is involved with Freedom Church of the Poor and several professional organizations. Dr. Beulah Howard’s recent writing is featured in the book, We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign (Broadleaf, 2021) edited by Rev. Liz Theoharis, The Other Journal, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, and Journal of American Academy of Religion. She is currently at work on a monograph on the role of the black power movement and black evangelical preachers. For fun, she enjoys music, bookstores, true crime documentaries, and sports. She resides in Columbus, Ohio with her amazing spouse, Jenn.
Reighan Gillam, Ph. D. is an ethnographer of Black visual culture. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines media at the intersection of racial ideologies, anti-racism, and protest. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that Afro-Brazilian media producers create images that render Black subjects and their experiences in complex ways. Her first book, Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media will be published in March 2022 from the University of Illinois Press. She earned a BA in Anthropology and Afro-American and African Studies from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Cornell University. Gillam’s next research project takes a transnational approach to the study of Black politics and culture. Her second book, entitled Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism examines how Afro-Brazilians engage African American people, culture, and performance. Gillam served as the Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She was elected to the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association.
Robert Greene II, Ph.D. 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.
Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of African American History in the Department of History at Furman University. 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: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice, 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. He’s also been interviewed by the History Channel, Curiosity Streams, the Washington Post, and New York Times.
Managing Editors
Joshua L. Crutchfield is a scholar of 20th century Black freedom movements, intellectual history and carceral studies. He is a PhD student in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he’s working on his dissertation project titled, “Imprisoned Black Women Intellectuals: Mae Mallory, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Safiya Bukhari and the Struggle for Abolition, 1961-1890.” Crutchfield’s scholarship has appeared in publications such as The Black Scholar, Ethnic and Third World Review of Books, Reviews in Digital Humanities, The Austin Chronicle, and in the African American Intellectual Historical Society’s award-winning blog “Black Perspectives.” Crutchfield is also a budding digital humanist. In 2015, he co-founded #BlkTwitterstorians, a digital humanities project that connects, supports, and affirms the scholarship of Black historians and academics on Twitter. In addition, his scholarship employs digital methods to visualize prison abolitionists’ language usage in his paper titled, “Text Mining The Abolitionist: Critical Resistance, Counter-Hegemonic Definitions, and Building the Case for Abolition.” Crutchfield’s community activism drives his scholarship. In 2015, he and a determined cadre of activists co-founded Black Lives Matter Nashville, a community-based group that organizes to end state-sanctioned violence against black people in Nashville. In 2021, Crutchfield was awarded the Harry Ransom Center’s inaugural UT-Austin fellowship. He resides in Austin, TX with his partner Tiffany and chihuahua Tinkerbell. You can follow his tweets at @Crutch4.
Tiana U. Wilson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History with a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include Black Women’s Internationalism, Black Women’s Intellectual History, Women of Color Organizing, and Third World Feminism. At UT, she led her department’s Anti-Racism Action Committee (2020-2021), served as the 2019-2020 Graduate Research Assistant for the Institute for Historical Studies, and was a research fellow for the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy between the years of 2017-2019. In the broader intellectual community, Tiana is the graduate student representative for the Association of Black Women Historians. Her dissertation has been supported by the Center for Engaged Scholarship, Sallie Bingham Center, Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, Smith College Libraries, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. Follow her on Twitter @PhenomenalTiana.
Associate Editors
Lacey Hunter, Ph.D. is a faculty instructor in the African American Studies and the Honors College at Rutgers University, Newark. She received her PhD from Drew University. Her dissertation focused on the role of African American religious ideologies on racial constructions. She holds an MA in American History from Rutgers University-Newark and is currently teaching courses on African American Studies and Afro-American History. She is actively involved in organizations that help urban students transition into college, as well as collaborative programs for “at-risk” college freshman. She is also deeply committed to restructuring historical teaching and encouraging greater literacy rates among students of color.
Guy Emerson Mount, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of American History and African American Studies at Wake Forest University. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2018 where he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Social Sciences. While at Chicago he co-founder of the Reparations at UChicago Working Group, which uncoved the University’s historical ties to slavery and organized alongside residents of the South Side of Chicago for reparations. His academic work focuses on the intersection of slavery, emancipation, and empire with a particular focus on Black internationalism and the afterlives of slavery. His current book project, tentatively titled From Slavery to Empire: Reconstruction in the Black Pacific analyzes the everyday lives of Black migrants to Hawai’i and the Philippines as they navigated the shifting currents of global capitalism and the rise of American overseas empire during the era of emancipation. He has been writing for Black Perspectives since 2015 and currently serving as the host and executive producer for the AAIHS’s new podcast “Black Thoughts Matter.” Follow him on Twitter @GuyEmersonMount.
Book Review Editor
Adam Lee Cilli, Ph.D. earned his doctorate in history at the University of Maine in 2016 and currently serves as an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. He is the author of Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945 (University of Georgia Press, 2021). This book illuminates the social justice efforts of journalists, scholars, social workers, medical experts, lawyers, and other professionals who navigated the fraught racial landscape of the urban North during the first phase of the Great Migration. Upending traditional depictions of Black reform work that stress its essential ties to racial uplift ideology, Canaan, Dim and Far shows how reformers experimented with a variety of strategies as they moved fluidly across ideologies and political alliances to find practical solutions to profound inequities. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Urban History, and Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Follow him on Twitter @LeeCilli.
Assistant Editor
Gloria Ashaolu is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Michigan State University. In spring 2020, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. from the Department of History, a B.A. from the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies, and a minor certificate in Education. Her commitment to historical research coupled with effective, innovative, and instructional practices that will dismantle structural barriers, is rooted in her desire for a fair and inclusive society that advances the lives of people within the Black diaspora and promotes the betterment of humanity. A culmination of her community-rooted engagements and academic work also inform how she hopes to create change through learning and teaching, and the creation of meaningful historical work that helps us better understand the present through our collective history. Her fields of interest include Black women’s history, Black intellectual history, the Black historical enterprise, and the history of Black education. Her research examines the contributions of Black female teachers in the Early Black History Movement. The broader impact of this study not only entails a better understanding of how Black women professionals worked as active agents in order to advance the Black freedom struggle, but it also offers us an insight into how Black female teachers informally became part of the Black intellectual tradition during the late 19th and early 20th century.
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