Erica Edwards, Co-Director
Erica R. Edwards is Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University.
She is the author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire (NYU Press, 2021), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association, earned an honorable mention for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, and was a finalist for the National Women Studies Assocation’s Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Book Prize, and the Prose Award in Literature from the Association of American Publishers. Her first book, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Edwards is the co-editor, with Roderick Ferguson and Jeffrey Ogbar, of Keywords for African American Studies (NYU Press, 2018).
Crystal Feimster, Co-Director
Crystal N. Feimster, a native of North Carolina, is an associate professor at Yale University in the Departments of African American Studies and History and the Programs of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the Harvey Goldblatt Head of Pierson College. Feimster is the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard Press, 2009) a history of how black and white women were affected by and responded to the problems of rape and lynching in the 19th and 20th century US South. Southern Horrors was awarded the North East Black Studies Association’s 2010 W.E.B. DuBois Book Prize and received Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians’ 2010 Darlene Clark Hine Award. Feimster’s essay “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society was recently awarded the Kentucky Historical Society’s Collin Award for best article in 2020. She has published essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Slave. Feimster is currently completing two book projects, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Lousiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.
Taylor Thompson, Administrator
Taylor W. Thompson is a doctoral student in American Studies and African American Studies and a Dean’s Emerging Scholar. She works to develop research at the intersection of Economic History and Black Feminist Theory.
Taylor earned her master’s degree in Oral History at Columbia University where her thesis unfolded into a public, online oral history, and speculative archive: “Tell Me About That World:” Speculative Archives + Black Feminist Listening Practices. The project developed Black Feminist listening practices for engaging with the oral histories of mutual aid organizers as they spoke about the types of futures they are working to produce through their organizing. In 2021, “Tell Me About That World” received Columbia University’s Jeffrey H. Brodsky Thesis Award.
Taylor graduated from Barnard College, where she majored in Economics & Social History and minored in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
To learn more about the Black Feminist Collective or to reach out to the Black Feminist Collective please contact administrator Taylor Thompson at taylor.thompson.twt9@yale.edu