Biography
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I am an oral historian and interdisciplinary scholar whose research is situated within the strands of 20th century cultural and social history with an emphasis on race, space, place, and memory in the U.S. South. My approach to scholarship and teaching is undergirded by Black studies and Black geographies. I earned my Ph.D. in the Social Foundations of Education from the University of Virginia (UVA) in spring 2023.
I currently serve as assistant project director of The Eastside Project, an oral history project based in Cleveland, Mississippi, that documents the long history of a historically Black school in the Mississippi Delta. I also work as a senior researcher with the Teachers in the Movement (TIM) oral history project and the Center for Race and Public Education in the South (CRPES), both at UVA.
Prior to pursuing my doctorate, I spent five years in the Mississippi Delta teaching and working in K-12 public education—I tell people that part of my soul is down in the Delta. I earned my M.A. from Columbia University’s Teachers College in 2015 and my B.S. from the University of Kentucky in 2011. I used to consider my path to academia to be a nontraditional route (with lots of unrelated bits), but the truth is that each of my lived experiences has shaped me as a scholar. I was born and raised in southeastern Kentucky in the heart of the Central Appalachian coalfields, and the mountains will always be home.