Staff Bios

Project Director

Jacqueline Goldsby

Jacqueline Goldsby is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006 and is currently editing James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, for W.W. Norton's Critical Edition series (forthcoming, 2009). Her third book project moves farther into the 20th century with its focus on post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement African American writing. Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Cultures of the 1940s and 1950s explores the literary cosmopolitanism that distinguishes Black fiction and poetry writing of the era, and argues for Chicago's centrality to fostering this generation's aesthetic worldliness.

Current Project Staff

Angela K. Bacon

Angela K. Bacon is a graduate of the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she focused on African American Literature and Gender Studies. She received her BA in English from Howard University and is currently pursuing graduate study in Archival Administration. Her research interests include gay African American writers, queer theory, cultural criticism, and the intersection of race and sexuality.

Melissa Barton

Melissa Barton is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at University of Chicago. While an undergraduate at Yale University, she helped create exhibitions about African American history and culture as a student assistant to the curator of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters at Beinecke Library. Her dissertation, “Staging Liberation: Race, Representation, and Forms of American Theater, 1934-1963,” examines the theatrical aesthetics and the multiply inflected political commitments of various theater companies calling themselves “Negro People’s Theatres,” before and during the Civil Rights Era. These theatres include the Fanny McConnell and Theodore Ward’s Negro People’s Theatre and the Skyloft Players, a group based at Parkway Community House. The dissertation also discusses several other Chicago-based people and productions, including Richard Wright’s Native Son and the American Negro Theatre’s tour of Anna Lucasta.

Christopher Dingwall

Christopher Dingwall is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where he studies American and African American cultural history. Christopher's dissertation will explore why, at the turn of the 20th century, Americans desired to remember slavery at sites of modern cultural production. He is broadly interested in the history of historical production, particularly in the people and institutions which comprised the black history movement in mid-20th century Chicago.

Doron Galili

Doron Galili received his B.A. in Film and Television Studies from Tel Aviv University and an M.A. in Moving Image Archive Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and is currently in the Ph.D. program in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is interested in the areas of the history of media, in particular pre- and early cinema and early television, and in issues of collection, preservation, and restorations of film.

Mollie Godfrey

Mollie Godfrey is pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on race, the novel, and the legacy of modernism, with a concentration on the work of such authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. She is currently working on a dissertation that will query the investment in and transformation of traditional humanist paradigms by African American novelists of the mid-twentieth century.

Celeste Day Moore

Celeste Day Moore is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Chicago. She researches American cultural history and the interplay of race and music in the US and overseas. Her dissertation reconstructs the post-WWII network of musicians, writers, intellectuals, and activists in Paris who produced, consumed, and performed African-American culture. She comes to the project with a background in documentary film research and community-based financial justice activism.

Traci Parker

Traci Parker is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. She studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States and African American history. Her research interests include race and ethnicity, labor, consumer culture, and community activism. She hopes to develop a project exploring the socialization of African Americans as sales and clerical workers and consumers in American department stores. She comes to the Mapping the Stacks project with experience archiving corporate and government records and researching corporate participation in the slave movement.

Christina Petersen

Christina Petersen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “‘Paradise for the Young’: Youth Spectatorship in the American Silent Film Era, 1904-1933,” excavates the historical and theoretical implications of adolescent youth spectatorship during the period cinema first became a mass medium in the United States. Her project is particularly interested in investigating the assumptions (first articulated in this era) that the new medium of film could inject America's youth with anti-social and violent tendencies. Her other interests include the role of race and ethnicity in the history of American cinema, spectatorship theory, theories of modernity, melodrama and the Gothic, and the relationship between cinema studies and the cinema archive.

Marcia Walker

Marcia Walker is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. She received her BSEd in Social Policy and African American Studies at Northwestern University and is currently studying twentieth-century American political and social history. Her research interests include African American history and politics in the pre- and post-civil rights era, black Chicago, the intersection of race, labor and gender in twentieth-century social movements, and the role of scholarship and activism in shaping public policy.

Former Project Staff

Darryl Heller

Darryl Heller worked for almost twenty years as a political activist, community organizer, and human service provider before coming to the University of Chicago to pursue studies in American history. Originally from South Carolina, Darryl has a B.A. in Philosophy from the College of Charleston and an M.A. in American Studies from Columbia University. His current interests are in labor formations in the nineteenth century as a means of understanding contemporary race and class issues.

Moira Hinderer

Moira Hinderer completed her Ph.D. in the History Department at the University of Chicago in 2007. Her dissertation, “Making African American Childhood: Chicago, 1917-1945,” examines the everyday lives of Black families, the expansion of Black children's media, and the production of academic and professional knowledge about race through the study of Black children. Currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches courses in African American history, Moira also serves as Project Manager for the Africana Studies Department's Diaspora Pathways Archives Access Project.

Allyson Hobbs

Allyson Hobbs is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “The Fictions of Race, Law, and Custom: The Problem of Racial Passing in America, 1840-1950,” traces the history of racial passing in the United States from the moment when it became a problem to the moment when it reportedly “passed out.” Allyson's project argues that passing is a continuous and enduring historical phenomenon that opens a window onto larger issues about race and the complexities of policing racial categories and racial boundaries. The challenges of marshalling evidence to write a history of passing have deepened Allyson's interest in hidden sources and archives. She is interested in developing connections between the academic world and the world of community-based scholarship.

Monica Mercado

Monica Mercado is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. women's history and the impact of religion on American culture. Her academic research is informed by her extensive experience in New York-area history museums and archives. Monica remains interested in forging links between museums, community institutions, and academia.