Project Team and Partners

Project Members

Ashley D. Farmer

Dr. Ashley Farmer is a historian of black women's history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (UNC Press) and Queen Mother Audley Moore: Mother of Black Nationalism (Pantheon). Farmer's scholarship has appeared in numerous venues including The Black Scholar and The Journal of African American History. Her research has also been featured in several popular outlets including Harper's Bazaar, NPR, and Teen Vogue. Her next book project is Watched: The Black Women Tracked by the FBI, a history of the rise and fall of COINTELPRO through the eyes of the Black women Hoover hunted.

Ashanté M. Reese

Dr. Ashanté M. Reese is an Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces. Dr. Reese’s work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity. She is the author of Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press) and Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness (forthcoming from W.W. Norton), and the co-editor of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice (Minnesota Press). Currently, Dr. Reese is working on a cultural history of sugar and Sugar Land, Texas.

Solana Shaw

Solana Shaw is a Holistic Organizational Management Consultant, partnering with individuals and small groups/organizations at the intersection of professional, personal, and community projects. Her work focuses on cohesion, care, and continuity for niche clients (partners) in health & wellness, creative entrepreneurship, and BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ personnel/programs in academia.

Cecelia Jordan

Cecelia Jordan is a doctoral student in the Education Policy and Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work explores the possibility of re-imagined policy frameworks that center the voices of those most pushed to the margins of society by generations of systemic inequity.

Sarah Porter

Sarah Porter is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin, where she studies U.S. social movements and imprisonment. Her dissertation explores campaigns to free Black women political prisoners between 1945 and 1975.

Community Partners

Carol Mead

Carol Mead is the Head of Archives and Manuscripts at The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. She has served in this role since 2017 and has been an archivist for over 26 years.

Jacqueline Smith-Francis

Dr. Jacqueline Smith-Francis is a social-justice creative who works as an archivist and curator of Black and African American stories and histories. She co-creates community-directed archives and research, frequently consulting on African American history and equitable workplace practices.

Rachel E. Winston

Rachel Winston is an Austin-based activist, curator, and archivist. She holds the inaugural Black Diaspora Archivist position with LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and has worked with numerous museum institutions.

Stephanie L. Lang

Stephanie L. Lang is a writer, organizer, and community curator who uses storytelling to explore concepts of home and resistance as a practice for social justice. She is the founder of RECLAIM, an organization dedicated to showcasing the narratives of Black people throughout the diaspora.