Connor J
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at Yale University
Expertise
American history, African-American history, Atlantic history, Southern history, Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, carceral studies, social history, oral history, Black feminist and queer theory
Bio
Hi there! I am a PhD student in Black Studies and History at Yale, and I am also pursuing a certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I study sexuality in the context of American slavery, specifically non-procreative and non-normative forms of sexual violence and power. As a native North Carolinian, I am more broadly interested in the history of the American South and in African-American history in the 19th-and-20th centuries through the lenses of gender and sexuality. I studied History and Africana Studies at Brown University for my undergrad, and I wrote my senior thesis on the history of slavery in Edenton, NC, the birthplace of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who escaped and penned a famous slave narrative. After college, I worked for 3 years at The Legal Aid Society in NYC in criminal appeals, and I have been doing anti-carceral work since I began tutoring in prison and co-facilitating a reading group while at Brown. I love baking, reading, reality TV, theater, and yoga, and my current hyperfixation is trying desperately to not kill any more plants in my apartment. When I'm not reading for school or Googling why my pothos keeps getting root rot, I frequently visit friends in NYC and have participated in a queer adult kickball league. I am hoping to try pottery and learn how to be a decent cook in the future, so stay tuned on those fronts! I would love to work with you since I love hearing about other people's passions, including history, and I have benefited from exceptional mentors who helped me learn how to research and write. I enjoy witnessing people cultivate their curiosity about the past and find answers to the historical questions that keep them up at night (so to speak).Project ideas
Naming Monumental Histories
There are monuments to the past seemingly everywhere we go, and buildings we traverse daily bear names of historical figures, but we rarely take the moment (or have the time) to explore the meaning behind that monument or name's origins. I'd love for you to choose a monument/memorial/name in a place that means something to you (somewhere you grew up, a place you visited, a destination you hope to see one day, a building at your school or in your town, etc.), and we can look into the history of that object or that name. This can tell us a lot about the legacies of the past that persist in the places we call home, for example, and any change that we want to make in the world has to proceed with a historical understanding of how we got here (over time and in a physical space). We could work on a podcast explaining the meaning behind such names or monuments, or we could propose a plaque, sign, or marker explaining the historical significance of a name or object.