UC research sheds light on historically marginalized communities

At the University of Cincinnati’s College of Art and Sciences (A&S), students are often given the opportunity to complete in-depth research tailored to their individual interests. For two graduate students in the history department, this research included challenging the notion that the only research with impact is done by those in white lab coats.

Maurice Adkins and Katherine Ranum have spent their graduate school years bringing to light stories of marginalized people, helping to fill gaps within U.S. historical studies. As a result, many institutions are taking notice of Adkins and Ranum, rewarding them with fellowships that allow them to continue their efforts to make historical research more inclusive.

Adkins, a recent graduate from the history department’s doctorate program, spent seven years traveling between Cincinnati and North Carolina, scouring archives and hunting down public records to complete his dissertation, which explores Black leadership at historically Black col- leges and Universities (HBCUs) in North Carolina from 1863-1931.

This quickly became laborious, Adkins says, due to the underfunding that many HBCUs have faced historically, resulting in poorer record keeping than that of other universities.

Growing up in North Carolina, Adkins attended preschool on an HBCU campus and cites this as an early inspiration for his interest in HBCUs, and his decision to research how leadership at HBCUs during the 19th and 20th century fought white supremacy.

“I particularly look at how HBCU leaders’ childhoods shaped their ideas about education, but also how they fought against white supremacy in a time when race relations in the United States were at their harshest,” Adkins said.

His interest grew when he attended North Carolina A&T, a historically Black university. “I was immersed in African American history, and growing up in North Carolina, surrounded by history constantly,” Adkins said. He spotted buildings on campus named after HBCU leaders and began to wonder how they came to have buildings named after them.

“There's got to be more to this,” Adkins remembers thinking. “They’re not just statues. There’s more to it. What’s the background? How did they get to where they were at? How did they have agency at the time when Black agency was restricted?”

The effort that Adkins puts into his research had not gone unnoticed by his A&S professors. “I was always really impressed with how curious he always was,” said Tracy Teslow, associate pro- fessor of history. "He was always digging further and looking for more material for class or digging further in his own research. He was amazingly diligent.”

When it came time to nominate students for the ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship, Adkins was an obvious choice, Teslow said. “Being one of a handful of people deemed an Emerging Junior Scholar in the United States, they can really lead us into the next generation of both scholarship and teaching in universities,” Teslow said. “His research is giving us a more nuanced examination of these complexities of power and race and gender.”

Featured image at top: Books in a research library. Credit/Inaki Del Olmo for Unsplash.