My primary interests are in African-American political culture, with an emphasis on gender.  This takes me in exciting and varied directions from a focus on citizenship and rights to literal and conceptual maps of the daily lives and worldviews of African Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries  to explorations of contemporary African American women visual artists' and filmmakers’ engagements with history.  Always I am conceptually most interested in unraveling the oft unseen work inherent in our daily lives – the work of friendship, the work of day-to-day political organizing, the work of creativity, and most importantly, the work of collectivity.  A driving passion of all my explorations is a firm belief that community is an ongoing process located/rooted in the work that people do to continuously create it and possible only when gumbo ya ya (everybody talks at once) rather than conventional consensus is given full rein.  Central to this is a concern for the work of narrative –from the stories black mothers have traditionally told their daughters to the retellings of histories that often undergird political rhetoric and, especially, the cherished stories students bring into the classroom and hold to so intently.

Selected Publications

2011   " Race, Sexuality, and African American Women Representing the Nation:                                                   
            an Interview with Elsa Barkley-Brown" by Agnieszka Graff and William R. Glass, The Americanist:    
            Warsaw Journal for the Study of the United States  XXVI (2011), 17-36

2008     “Stephanie E. Pogue and the Artist’s Veil,” in Arabesque (David C. Driskell Gallery,
             University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 2008)

2008     “Bodies of History,” in Deborah Gray White, ed., Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower
             (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 215-226

2003     "Memory Work:  Quilts in Southern African-American History," in African-American Quilts:
             60 Historic Textiles from the Farmer-James Collection ca. 1860-1947 (Four Sisters Gallery, North
             Carolina Wesleyan College, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, 2003)

2000     Major Problems in African American History, vol. 2: From Freedom to "Freedom Now",
             Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, September 2000. (co-editor with Thomas C. Holt)

2000     Major Problems in African American History, vol. 1: From Slavery to Freedom, Boston:
             Houghton-Mifflin, January 2000. (co-editor with Thomas C. Holt)

1997     "Introduction" to reissue of Delilah Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (1919;
             reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1997), xv-xlviii

1997     "To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women's Political                                                      History, 1865-1880" in Ann Gordon, Bettye Collier-Thomas, John H. Bracey, Arlene Avakian,
             Joyce Berkman, eds., African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1960 (Amherst: University                          of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 66-99

1995     "Imaging Lynching:  African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,"
             in African American Women Speak Out On Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva                                                       Smitherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100-124

1995     (with Gregg D. Kimball), "Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond," Journal of Urban
              History, 21, 3 (March 1995), 295-346                     

1994     "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere:  African American Political Life in the Transition
             from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture, 7, 1 (Fall 1994), 107-146

1993     Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 volumes, Brooklyn: Carlson
             Publishing; paperback edition: Bloomington, Indiana University, 1995.  (Associate Editor;
             Darlene Clark Hine, Editor)

1992     "`What has happened here':  The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics,"                              Feminist  Studies, 18, 2 (Summer 1992), 295-312

1991     "Polyrhythms and Improvization:  Lessons for Women's History," History Workshop:  A Journal of Socialist                 and Feminist Historians, 31 (Spring 1991), 85-90

1990     Black Women in United States History, 16 volumes, Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing.
            (Associate Editor; Darlene Clark Hine, Editor)

1989     "Mothers of Mind," Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women VI, 1 (Summer 1989), 4-11

1989     "African American Women's Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African
             American Women's History," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14, 4 (Summer
             1989), 921-929  

1989     "Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke,"
            Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14, 3 (Spring 1989), 610-633