Introducing Dr. Felicia Jamison, Assistant Professor of History & Comparative Humanities

December 12, 2022

We are delighted to share that Dr. Felicia Jamison joined the Department of Comparative Humanities and History this past Fall! Her research and teaching focuses on works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, public history, and public humanities. Additionally, she will oversee the MA Track in Public Humanities.

Before coming to UofL, Dr. Jamison was an Assistant Professor of History at Drake University and was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her PhD in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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.

Dr. Jamison recently spoke with Dr. A. Glenn Crothers, Associate Professor of History, about her academic background, her research projects and priorities, and some of the courses she will be teaching at UofL. You can read that full interview here.