New Books in Black Feminist Studies

Join us for the first in-person Feminisms Unbound panel since 2020! Co-sponsored by the GCWS and the Africana Studies Program at Northeastern University, we are thrilled to host this invigorating and wonderful panel at Northeastern University.

Our inspiration for this roundtable comes at a crucial time in light of the current administration; we want to amplify the importance of Black feminist scholarship and inquiry in this moment by offering multiple perspectives from different disciplines. 

Panelists:

• Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones, Assistant Professor of Theology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Boston College 

  Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. Her scholarship specializes in Mariology and black feminist and womanist thought. Her first monograph (Immaculate Misconceptions, in progress) offers a theological account of the rise of the global sex trade. Centering the icon of the black madonna, the book holds accountable theological notions of purity and rape at the site of black flesh. Her second project (See No Evil, in progress) names how technology has changed the way we visualize violence and black death, and offers a theology of black protest.

• Meredith D. Clark, Associate Professor of Race and Political Communication, UNC Chapel Hill

  Meredith D. Clark is an associate professor of race and political communication. Her research on race, media, and power, has included everything from online community building and online activism to how news media cover Black people and communities. In 2015, she was named to The Root 100 as one of the most influential African Americans in the country.
  
  

  Her book, “We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and Digital Counternarratives,” was published in January 2025 by Oxford University Press, and quickly named one of New York Time’s “Top 5 Recommended Reads.”
  
  

  Dr. Clark’s research has been published in New Media & Society, Communication & the Public, the International Symposium of Online Journalism, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Social Movement Studies. She also co-edited “Interrogating Digital Blackness,” a special issue of Social Media + Society. 

  She was most recently featured in the Hulu docuseries, "Black Twitter: A People's History,” and the MSNBC documentary, “Canceled.” 

• Mary Frances Phillips, Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  MaryFrances Phillips is a proud native of Detroit, Michigan. She is a historian, scholar-activist, public intellectual, and Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on race and gender in post-1945 social movements and the carceral state. Her scholarly interests include the Modern Black Freedom Struggle, Black Feminism, and Black Power Studies. 

  Her book, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (2025, NYU Press’ Black Power Series), is both a critical study and biography of Black Panther Party veteran Ericka Huggins, one of the longest-serving women members of the organization. Her book historicizes women’s prison organizing, resistance, and collision with law enforcement of women political prisoners. Phillips has published journal articles in SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, the Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Western Journal of Black Studies, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, and the Syllabus Journal. Outside the academy, her essays have been featured in the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine’s blog, New Black Man (in Exile), Colorlines, Vibe Magazine, Black Youth Project, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog, Black Perspectives. Her work has garnered media attention in TIME Magazine, the New York Historical Museum & Library Women at the Center blog series, the Detroit Free Press, BronxNet Cable Television, Bronx News 12, WBAI Pacifica Radio, New York City, and WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio. 

  Furthermore, Phillips research has been supported by the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) Grant within the City University of New York, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame, the American Association of University Women American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program with the City University of New York.  She earned her Ph.D. in African American and African Studies from Michigan State University, M.A. in African American and African Studies from The Ohio State University, and B.S. in Health Studies from Michigan State University. She enjoys art on her nails and collecting dolls and Black figurines when she is not writing or teaching.

Moderated by Régine Jean-Charles of Northeastern University