Olivia Hagedorn  was awarded the 2019 Smalley Fellowship in Gender and Women's Studies for her dissertation proposal entitled "'Call Me African': Black Women and Disaporic Cultural Feminism in Chicago, 1930-1980."  Hagedorn, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History, will use the fellowship to conduct research at the Chicago History Museum and the DuSable Museum.  She will also review papers from the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection.   Here is her dissertation abstract:

My dissertation is titled, “‘Call Me African’: Black Women and Diasporic Cultural Feminism, 1930-1980.” It examines the diasporic cultural feminism of four extraordinary black Chicago women—Margaret Burroughs, Gwendolyn Brooks, Christine Johnson, and Val Gray Ward—from the Chicago Black Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement. As friends and collaborators, these women formed the nucleus of a thriving community of black women cultural workers in Chicago. Together, they enacted an innovative, pan-Africanist and feminist politics that challenged masculinist framings of black radicalism; reshaped dominant practices of respectability; emphasized connections among racial, gender, and class oppression in global, diasporic terms; and generally sought to empower other women across the African diaspora. 

In chronicling the lives of these women, my dissertation deepens our understanding of the myriad ways black women in Chicago used history, art, and culture to link this Midwestern U.S. city to the African world. Accordingly, my dissertation not only extends the geographical scope of the African diaspora to include the Midwest, but also demonstrates how black women were authoritative progenitors of pan-Africanist thought in Chicago. At the same time, my dissertation illuminates the gendered contours of these women’s diasporic freedom dreams, and it provides a theoretical and empirical template for appreciating the distinct ways race, space, gender, and class have shaped diasporic communities and politics in the American Heartland.