Liberal Arts

Professor P. Gabrielle Foreman awarded prestigious MacArthur Fellowship

P. Gabrielle Foreman, Paterno Family Professor of American Literature, professor of African American studies and history and co-director of the Center for Digital Black Research, has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. Credit: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur FoundationAll Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — P. Gabrielle Foreman, Paterno Family Professor of American Literature, professor of African American studies and history, and co-director of the Center for Digital Black Research at Penn State, has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached “genius grant” awarded to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selecting fellows: exceptional creativity; promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments; and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Fellows may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers. The purpose of the fellowship is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.

“There is no other award that nominates recipients from across the spectrum of this country’s most creative cultural producers, scholars, and democracy defenders. I am humbled beyond measure to have been selected,” Foreman said. “My career has been grounded in collaborative and public-facing work that pushes against the ways my field often defines success. For me, this award affirms a collective approach to scholarship that has been the foundation of my work at every stage of my professional life.”

Foreman was selected for “setting a new standard for digital and collaborative humanities scholarship while also uncovering histories of African American organizing that are still relevant and resonant today,” according to the foundation. As a literary historian and digital humanist recovering early traditions of African American activism, she seeks to understand the power of collaborative production of knowledge. To that end she forges partnerships between writers and readers, artists and viewers, and among established, independent, and emerging scholars.

“Professor Foreman is setting an important new standard in recovering and preserving the voices of generations of Black activists and organizers in the United States,” noted Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts. “I am proud for our college and University that Gabrielle has been named a MacArthur Fellow, and I applaud the foundation for recognizing her groundbreaking work.”

Foreman’s early work focused on the literary activism of nineteenth-century Black women. Her first book, “Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century” (2009) reveals how writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Frances E. W. Harper communicated with multiple audiences simultaneously through embedded historical references that, for those who understood them, called for resistance and more radical reform.

Foreman is the founding director of the Colored Conventions Project (CCP), a digital initiative that documents historic Black organizing efforts and brings to light the longest Black political organizing effort prior to the advent of the NAACP. From 1830 until the 1890s, free and emancipated Black Americans came together in state and national conventions across the expanding United States and Canada. Beyond ending slavery and segregation, they debated strategies to achieve educational access, labor and legal justice, and freedom from state-sanctioned violence. Convention records had been scattered across forgotten newspaper columns and isolated repositories.

In response, Foreman and her collaborators have mobilized students, scholars, archivists, volunteers, and members of historic Black churches that hosted conventions to help find convention proceedings, speeches, and petitions and make them freely accessible. CCP enacts Foreman’s vision of collaboration and recreates the collectivism that characterized the conventions themselves. Thousands of students have been trained in collective research and digital archiving methods through the CCP and its curriculum, and the project has more than quadrupled the number of convention proceedings accessible to researchers and the public.

The team and its North American teaching partners also curate interactive digital exhibits, teaching materials, and other projects that bring the stories behind these records to life. For example, one exhibit highlights the role of women in creating local infrastructure (such as providing safe accommodations for travelers and mobilizing participation of community members) for the conventions at a time when such organizing was met with White violence and resistance.

Another example is “The Colored Conventions Movement and Beyond in Philadelphia,” a mural by artist Ernel Martinez that honors the launch of the national movement for Black civil rights, voting rights, education, abolition, and freedom from racial violence that originated in Philadelphia thirty years before the Civil War. A second mural wall commemorates Black political organizing and protests since the convention movement ended in 1900. A dedication ceremony for the mural will take place at 4 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 28, at The Michael’s Org Courtyard Apartments (1021 S. 4th Street) in Philadelphia, with a community party to follow.

With emerging scholars who were at the time graduate student co-founders of the CCP, Foreman co-edited “The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century” (2021). The volume introduces readers to the full geographic and political scope of the convention movement and examines its relationship to anti-slavery activism, which it outlasted by more than three decades. Building upon the publication of that volume — as well as the first scholarly gathering on the colored conventions that led to its publication—– the CCP will host “The Making of a Social Movement,” a hybrid symposium examining the oratorical and rhetorical legacies of the colored convention movement on Oct 18 and 19.

The daughter of a poet, Foreman is also engaged in long-standing collaborations with artists to bring early Black history to the stage through dance and poetry. Her forthcoming book, “Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake” (2023), emerges from this decade-long effort.

Foreman received her baccalaureate degree in American studies from Amherst College and her doctorate in ethnic studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to coming to Penn State, she was the Ned B. Allen Professor of English and professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Delaware and taught at Occidental College and Wayne State University.

Last Updated October 17, 2022

Contact