55th Anniversary Symposium

Taylor L. Bailey is a public historian, literary scholar, and curator interested in how marginalized people navigate life, seek liberation, and establish kinship. She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, which was formerly the Public History Project— a multi-year effort to uncover and give voice to histories of discrimination, exclusion, and resistance on campus. Taylor’s work with the Center for Campus History has allowed her to utilize the expansiveness of storytelling to generate knowledge around important social, political, and cultural issues to public audiences across campus in intellectual yet creative ways. Working with UW’s lesser told and known histories and imparting the knowledge of historical findings to the public has allowed Taylor the opportunity to model the ways history can be used as a tool for change.

Taylor studied English literature and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and received a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in African American Studies. She currently serves as a member of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) Committee for the National Council on Public History and as a committee member for Dane County NAACP’s local ACT-SO committee.

Verlena L. Johnson earned a Master’s Degree in Afro-American Studies (emphasis: Art History, 1996) from the University of Wisconsin — Madison and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Sculpture, 2001).

Her MA thesis, “The Image Text Composite in the Art of Faith Ringgold: Form and Narrative,” explores Ringgold’s art using WJT Mitchell’s Picture Theory to examine the meaning created by Ringgold combining images and text.  It also examines Ringgold’s “Picasso’s Studio” as a meta-picture or a picture about pictures, specifically focusing on Black female subjectivity.

Verlena co-edited the Journal of Lesbian Studies’ Special Issue on Lesbians of African Descent: Contemporary Perspectives and published a children’s picture book, The Adventures of Kai and the Magical Machines.  Currently, she is working on a number of paintings of queer African Americans as part of her “African American LGBTQ Historical Figures Series,” as well as writing a memoir and creating artwork related to childhood trauma.

She has exhibited her work in Chicago, Madison, New York City, Oakland and Los Angeles, amongst other places.

Charles L. Hughes is Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Department of African American Studies at UW-Madison, where he also earned his Ph.D. In U.S. History. He’s the author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South and Why Bushwick Bill Matters, along with a wide range of articles for both scholarly and general audiences. He is the co-founder of the digital music newsletter No Fences Review, co-editor of the American Music Series at the University of Texas Press, and a former contributor to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Hard History podcast. He is a native of Wisconsin.

William Sturkey is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and researches the history of the United States, especially race in the American South. He is the author of two books and the editor or a third, To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools, which, unbeknownst to him at the time, he began researching while an M.A. student in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His writings have appeared in popular venues such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, and he is currently writing a narrative history of America in the 1960s.

Dr. Shannen Dee Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton. She is the author of Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke University Press, 2022), which was named a top five book published in religion by Publishers’ Weekly in 2022. Subversive Habits also received the 2022 Letitia Woods Brown Award for Best Book in African American Women’s History from the Association of Black Women Historians and the 2023 Wesley-Logan Prize for Outstanding Book in African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and the first Black woman elected to the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association, Dr. Williams authored the award-winning column, “The Griot’s Cross,” published by the Catholic News Service from 2020 to 2022. Dr. Williams is a co-founder of the Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African American History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 2020, Williams also submitted successful proposals to establish the Mother Mary Lange Lecture in Black Catholic History at Villanova University and the Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. Prize through the American Catholic Historical Association and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.

Simon Balto is an associate professor of history and College of Letters and Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of the multi-award-winning Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). He is a regular contributor for The Guardian, and has written for multiple scholarly and popular publications, including TIME, TheWashington Post, The Baffler, American Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, and The Journal of Urban History. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and most recently, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He is currently at work on two new projects. White Innocents: Terror, Racism, and Innocence in the Making of Modern America (contracted with Norton) is a history of white mob terrorism in the United States from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, and of the refusals and incapacities of the nations’ assorted “criminal justice systems” to reckon with it. “I am a Revolutionary”: The Political Life and Legacy of Fred Hampton (contracted with Haymarket) is a biography of the life and political afterlife of Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was murdered by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department in 1969 at the age of twenty-one.

Dr. LaShawn Faith Washington is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of Educational Psychology – Science of Psychology, Data, and Research in Education program. She joined the OU faculty in August 2023. Dr. Washington earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (Higher Education Research) with a minor in African American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Dallas, Texas native, Dr. Washington is a proud first-generation non-traditional student, community college graduate, and a two-time alumna of The University of Texas-Austin receiving an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction – Cultural Studies in Education, and a B.A. in Government (Honors).

Her overarching research explores the historical and contemporary inequities in higher education and how issues of race and gender intersect in ways that impact the experiences of Black women in academia. Her most current ethnographic research project, entitled: “Let Love Lead,” utilized Black feminist theorizing through a bell hooksian approach to examine relationships, intersectional identities, and notions of love between Black women collegians and Black women student affairs professionals at a predominately white institution. Dr. Washington was recently awarded $22,000 by her college and the OU Institute for Community and Society Transformation and to extend her current reach investigating the identities of Black college women through visual elicitation methods and focus groups. Additionally, she was selected as a Semi-Finalist for Dissertation of the Year by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division J. She has presented research at the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), The National Association for Student Affairs Professionals (NASPA), and The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), and AERA. Her most recent scholarship was published in The Journal of Higher Education, The International Journal of Qualitative Research, and Teachers College Record.”

Catrina J. Sparkman is the Artistic Director of the Creator’s Cottage, a maker studio space for artists and writers in Madison, Wisconsin. Catrina is also the founder and CEO of The Ironer’s Press Ministries, a non-profit that serves the needs of women, children and families of color in Wisconsin through the use ofsocial action theater, publishing and the creative arts. As a professional artist for over 25 years, Catrina has carved out a successful career niche as a grassroots theater artist and authorpreneur of several works of fiction and non-fiction. She also works as an instructor of Theatre and Drama, a content creator, public speaker, publisher, book coach, and creative consultant for various national and international organizations. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in English, Creative Writing, and Masters in African American Studies.