About
Felicia Jamison is Assistant Professor of Public Humanities and Public History in the Departments of Comparative Humanities and History. She works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, public history, and public humanities. She received her PhD in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Additionally, she was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.
She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Reconstructing Freedom: Black Women and Property Ownership in the Rural South. The book analyzes the strategies and techniques Southern Black women used to accumulate property during slavery in the antebellum period and purchase land and deed property to their progeny during Reconstruction. By tracing the practice of property and landownership through several generations, this study shows that Southern African Americans built on traditions of property ownership created in slavery to purchase and maintain ownership of land during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It also shows that Black women had long been integral in this process.
In addition to researching and writing history, Professor Jamison is passionate about public history and public humanities. She has previously taught courses such as “African American History as Public History,” which analyzes how African American history has been interpreted in the public sphere in museums and at historic sites, in public schools, and in films.