Mia Bay - Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women

The idea of an academic exploration of the intellectual history of black women first took shape among the coeditors over dinner. What followed was the start of an academic collaboration: thirty scholars, professors, and graduate students from varying disciplines shared ideas in a working group hosted by Rutgers University in April 2002. How might a history of black women as intellectuals be written, and could we encourage a distinct field of scholarship on the subject? The need for an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration was clear and Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women began.

The project found an ideal home and generous support through Columbia Universitys Center for the Study of Social Difference. A collective was formed, bringing together scholars from history and literature. Very few of us were seasoned intellectual historians. Still, we shared a commitment to understanding black women as the producers of ideas. Over three years, Columbia, along with Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania, hosted a series of workshops and roundtables that enriched the collectives ideas through engagement with new faculty and students. Thank you to the Black Atlantic Seminar and Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University; the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, the Department of History, and the Law School at the University of Michigan; and the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for supporting this series of meetings. Columbia University remained our home base, and in April 2011 we returned there for a capstone event, an international conference cosponsored by the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Thank you to the many individual faculty, staff, administrators, and graduate students who helped organize and sustain our meetings. They include Jackie Castledine, Laura Ciolkowski, Carol Davis, Krystle Frazier, Kevin Gaines, Ziva Galili, Gale Garrison, Tikia Hamilton, Sharon Harris, Michele Houston, Elizabeth James, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Mia Kissil, Shawn Mendoza, Imani Owens, Lynn Shanko, Melissa Stein, and Keith Wailoo.

We owe a debt of gratitude to individuals in our extended collective, too many to name here, whose contributions as writers, speakers, and commentators enriched the project, its meetings, and this volume. Thank you to those who contributed to our early working group meeting nearly ten years ago and our final conference in 2011. We have received indispensable encouragement from those who supported Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women by writing letters of support for our grant applications, promoted it among their students, and served as anonymous readers for this collection of essays. The University of North Carolina Press has supported this project and the resulting volume from the outset, and we thank Chuck Grench and other UNC Press staff, along with the coeditors of the John Hope Franklin Series, Waldo Martin and Patricia Sullivan, for their steady and unbounded commitment to these essays and the field of black womens intellectual history. Thank you also to the National Humanities Center for support at the production stage of the volume. Special thanks to Elsa Barkley Brown, Kathy Bassard, Hazel Carby, Anne Du Cille, Carol Boyce Davies, Natanya Duncan, Eric Foner, Deborah Gray White, Veronica M. Gregg, Jacquline Goldsby, Dayo Gore, Sandra Gunning, Gerald Horne, Tiya Miles, Michelle Mitchell, Donna Murch, Hannah Rosen, Megan Sweeney, and Cynthia Young. The core members of the collective, those whose essays appear here, have our heartfelt appreciation. Thank you all for your vision, commitment, innovation, and warm collegiality.