Sharon Harley
In residence Spring 2008
Chair and Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R
Telephone: 617.384.8346
Email: sharley@aasp.umd.edu
Biography
Dr. Sharon Harley is an Associate Professor and Chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in United States History from Howard University and has conducted considerable research on black women’s history, focusing on their gender and labor issues and, most recently, their cultural production and radical politics. She is the editor and a contributor to the anthologies Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers, 2002); both volumes are products of Ford Foundation-funded research seminars that Dr. Harley co-directed, and, in the case of the former, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio conference grant. She is the author of the highly acclaimed The Timetables of African American History: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in African-American History (Simon & Schuster, 1995) and co-editor of the pioneer volume in black women’s history, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (Kennikat Press, 1978 and reprinted by the Black Classic Press, 1997). She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Dignity and Damnation, a historical study of the intersection of gender, patriarchy, and citizenship in the black community. She has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and fellowships, including a 2003 Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, the Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Fellowship for Minority Group Scholars. She also serves on the Organization of American Historians’s Editorial Board for The OAH’s Best American History Essays and as an Associate Editor of the journal Black Women, Gender & Families.
Project
“Dignity and Damnation: Black Women Negotiating Freedom and Patriarchy in the Post-Emancipation United States”
Covering the time period of the 1860s to the 1930s, this book project offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the construction and interaction of ideas about gender, labor, and citizenship amongst black women in the United States. It represents nearly a decade-long examination of black voices from testimonies of former slaves, letters, newspapers, literary texts, memoirs, and oral histories in an effort to more fully reveal how members of the black community shaped concepts of work, freedom, and gender and how they experienced them in the contexts of internal and external communities. It addresses the following questions that are critical to a better understanding of the interplay of gender, labor, and citizenship: What price, if any, did black women pay for “race loyalty” in the post-bellum period through the early twentieth century? And, central to that question, how was race loyalty defined over those decades? How did black men and women understand and negotiate gender roles in a system of racialized patriarchy? Further, how did gender dynamics within black communities reflect shifts in the dominant racial climate of the United States? Finally, when, how, and under what circumstances did black women tie and articulate female authority and gendered perceptions to their ongoing struggle for their fuller realization of freedom and citizenship?