Notice: Jim Alexander Papers Will Be Closed For Processing

by Laura Starratt, Head of Archives Processing for Rose Library Jim Alexander, African American activist and photographer, is one of the most celebrated photographers of African American life and history in the United States, but he is also a renowned educator, business owner, rare book collector, and activist.  His papers were first acquired in 2014 Read More …

Mixed Materials: Reflections on the Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch

Alexandra Nicome is a 2025-2026 recipient of the Billops-Hatch Fellowship, which supports researchers working in the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives. Among its various holdings, the Billops-Hatch archives has more than 1,200 play scripts written by African Americans, 1,400 interviews with various artists, and a library of rare and unique books and periodicals.  Read More …

Beholding Geoffrey Holder’s Wiz: Dance, Beauty, and Spectacle in the Holder-de Lavallade Papers

Emily Hawk is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Dickinson College. Her research examines Black modern dance as a form of intellectual and political life in the twentieth century United States. She earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History at Columbia University and previously served as postdoctoral research associate in African American Studies at Princeton Read More …

Seeking Eva Pearl Green Francis (1870-1941): Founding mother and businesswoman of Mound Bayou, MS

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant is a womanist sociologist and the Louise R. Noun ’29 Chair in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College. The author of Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of Costly Performance (2009) and To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the Audacity of Dean Lucy Diggs Read More …

Transnational Liminal Spaces: Reflections from the Marcus Garvey Fellowship at Emory’s Rose Library

Casey Johnson is a PhD student in Indiana University Bloomington’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies department. He was the 2025 recipient of Rose Library’s Marcus Garvey Foundation Research Fellowship. As I made my way to Emory University’s campus, weaving through surrounding hills of historic homes and a lush green golf course I Read More …

The Hardings, Academic Activism, and Religion as Orientation

Kaylen Smith is a History Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. Her dissertation explores the transition from the modern civil rights movement into the Black Power era through the lens of religious expression and activism. Kaylen received a Stuart A. Rose Library Short-Term fellowship to study the Vincent A. Harding papers and the Rosemarie Freeney Harding Read More …

Conservative Currents in Black America: Grassroots Struggles Against “Black-on-Black Crime” and the Urban Crisis Post-1960s

Chanelle Rose is a professor of History at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. She specializes in Modern American history with particular emphasis on African American history, post-WWII America, Civil Rights-Black Power, tourism, conservatism, and urban history. Rose is a a 2025 recipient of Rose Library’s African American History and Culture Visiting Researcher Fellowship.  There Read More …

The Importance of Safe Space in Black Cultural Production: Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, 1960s-1970s 

Crystal Nelson is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research and teaching focuses on Black art and Black visual culture(s) as articulated through painting, photography, film/video, and performance. They are a 2025 recipient of Rose Library’s African American History and Culture Visiting Researcher Fellowship. I have recently begun Read More …

Digging into ‘Souls Grown Deep’

Joshua Massey is a Ph.D. candidate at Bard Graduate Center, where they study the art and material culture of the contemporary American South. Their dissertation explores the yard environments of artists Lonnie Holley, Mary Tillman Smith, Dinah Young, and Joe Minter, and the ways in which they function as sites of Black creative, social, and Read More …

Excavating the Basement: Reflections from the Billops-Hatch Collection   

Ebonie Pollock is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture department at Harvard University studying Black feminist art histories with a particular focus on Black women sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the 2024 recipient of the Billops-Hatch Fellowship at Rose Library.  I had the privilege of Read More …

African American Collections and the Significance of Serials

by the African American Collections Team The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library holds over 1,200 titles within Emory University Libraries’ (EUL) African American Periodical Collection. These materials are often referred to as serials, which are publications issued at fixed intervals. Our serials range from journals to magazines and newspapers, and many Read More …