Years in Program: 5
Fields: African American, United States and African History
Advisor: Dr. Pero G. Dagbovie, Professor
Educational Background:
2016
MA in African American and African Studies, The Ohio State University
Graduate Minor, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
2013
BA in African American Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Second Major, Political Science and Minor, Southern Studies
Email: howar260@msu.edu
I am a fifth year doctoral candidate studying African American, United States and African History. My dissertation research focuses on the activism of Black students during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement in the American South. I am particularly interested in the activism of Black students in North Carolina and how race, gender, class, location and respectability influenced their activism and the subsequent commemoration of their activism. Additionally, I am interested in the uses of oral history and other methods to address erasures and silences in the traditional archives concerning Black women and Black people at-large. Relatedly, I have worked on three digital humanities projects during my time as a student, the Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina Project, the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project and #Blktwitterstorians. As an undergraduate student, I collected meta-data on monuments in North Carolina for the Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina Project. After garnering my MA degree, I served as a research assistant on the Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Oral Histories of the Multiracial Freedom Struggles in Texas project which was based at Texas Christian University and funded by the National Endowment of Humanities. As a research assistant, I conducted video, oral history interviews in Texas for two months documenting both the Mexican American and African American freedom struggles. In the Fall (2021), I will publish a book chapter on racial violence, resistance and public memory in Montgomery County, Texas. Lastly, I worked with the #Blktwitterstorians team which is a digital humanities project founded by Dr. Aleia Brown and Joshua Crutchfield that teaches African American History and fosters intellectual conversations with the public via social media platforms. During the 2019-2020 academic year, I was a CLIR Mellon Fellow for Dissertation Research in Original Sources. I am also a University Enrichment Fellowship recipient and have served as a Teaching Assistant for in-person and online courses at Michigan State University.