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Current Appointment
Chief Curator and Director of Collections, Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket – July 2024-Present
Previous Appointments
Women’s History Curator | Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and American Women’s History Initiative (AWHI), Washington, D.C.
Graduate Fellow | Field Foundation of Illinois, Chicago, IL
Museum Manager | Hoosier Grove Museum, Streamwood, IL
Project Archivist | Ora Mobley Sweeting Civil Rights Archive, Los Angeles, CA
Museum Specialist | Temecula Valley Museum, Temecula, CA
Digital Archivist | NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Curator & Program Manager | Dora Nelson African American Art and History
Museum, Perris, CA
Education
Ph.D. Candidate, History – Northwestern University, September 2017-Present
M.A., History – Northwestern University
Certificate in Digitization Skills for Libraries and Cultural Heritage Institutions – Pasadena City College
B.A., American Studies/Public & Oral History – California State University, San Bernardino
A.S., Anthropology – Sacramento City College
Awards, Grants & Fellowships
2023-2024, Propel Program Fellow, Association of Art Museum Curators
2022-2023 New York-Historical Society, The Center for Women’s History Early Career Workshop
2020-2021 NYPL Short-Term Fellowship
2020-2021 Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant
2019-2020, Field Foundation of Illinois, Graduate Fellow
2019-2020, The History Makers Digital Humanities Fellowship
2019-2020, California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program Scholar
2019, Northwestern University-SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program
2019, Graduate Student Partial Grant, Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching Conference
2019, Graduate Student Travel Grant, African American Intellectual Society
Conferences and Talks
“Locating Black Women’s Internationalism in the Archives & Beyond” Global Visions of Freedom: A Symposium on Black Women and Internationalism, Brown University, 2024
“Black Women’s History on the Margins” on Communities of Practice and Care: Lessons from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative panel, Nineteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities, Santa Clara University, 2023
Where We Are and Are Not: Reflecting on Women’s Public History, National Council on Public History Annual Meeting; Atlanta, GA, 2023
“When Glamour Was African: Etta Moten Barnett and Race, Gender, and Celebrity
in the Black Freedom Struggle, 1945-1970” (virtual); respondent, Dr. Uhuru Portia
Phalafala (Stellenbosch University), The Ubuntu Dialogues: Museums and Communities Connect, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded partnership, 2021
between the MSU African Studies Center and the Stellenbosch University Museum
“Etta Moten Barnett’s World: Oral History Storytelling.” The HistoryMakers in Higher Education: Phase II Mellon Grant Co-Principal Investigators, 5th Annual Higher Education Advisory Board Meeting, 2020
“The Ethics of Public History” and “Black Public History from Emancipation to Neo-Emancipation.” National Council on Public History (NCPH) Annual Conference, Hartford, CT, 2019
“The Call and the Answer: Radio, Photography, & Transnational Black Womanhood in WWII.” African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) Annual Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, 2019
“The Call and the Answer: War, Peace & Black Women’s Internationalism.” Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) Annual Conference, Indianapolis, IN, 2018
“When and Where I Enter: Black Women in the Age of DuBois and Washington and DuBois.” Chabraja Center Conference, 2018
“The Global Color Line in the Promised Land: Garveyism, the Great Migration, and Black Uplift in the American West.” – Borderlands: Histories and Literatures” Symposium, Northwestern University, 2017
“What Color is Your Cohort?” Association of African American Museums Annual Conference, Riverside, CA, 2016
INVITED TALKS
“Juneteenth,” America 250; Universal Music Group, Minnesota Humanities, June 2022
Panelist, 50th Anniversary of Shirley Chisholm’s Presidential Campaign, Library of Congress, March 2022
Panelist, “On American Independence and Freedom: The Juneteenth Story,” The Chicago History Museum, June 2020
Keynote Speaker, “Remembering a Forgotten Woman: The Feminist Politics of Etta Moten Barnett,” Hoosier Women at Work for Suffrage and Citizenship, March 2020
Keynote Speaker, “Always Keep the Records: Ora Mobley Sweeting’s Archival Activism.” DuSable Museum of African American History, April 2018