It’s the weekend POU Family! I hope everyone has a great Saturday. Concluding this week’s theme, today’s post will highlight Whitney Battle-Baptiste.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste is an American historical archaeologist of African and Cherokee descent. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University. Battle-Baptiste’s research focuses on “how the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality look through an archaeological lens”.
Battle-Baptiste is currently working on “Rules of Engagement: Community-Based Archaeology as a Tool for Social Justice” (Left Coast Press). Her current research takes place on the Millars Plantation site on Eleuthera island in the Bahamas, at a community-based archeology project. She focuses on the archeology of gender and race because “if people are being written about, archaeology can be used not only to fill the gaps but to create alternative stories and histories.”
Battle-Baptiste grew up in the Bronx and was exposed to history through her mother, who taught on Long Island. She attended Virginia State University, an HBCU in Petersburg, with the same goal, then earned her master’s degree in history at The College of William and Mary. At a summer internship, she met several African-American women who were archaeologists, and this sparked her interest in the subject.
She pursued her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in the African Diaspora program in anthropology and focused her studies on archaeology through the lens of race and gender. Her dissertation, titled “A Yard to Sweep: Race, Gender and the Enslaved Landscape,” was published in 2004 and based on her research at Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee plantation, The Heritage. It explores the gender power dynamics in captive African domestic areas.
Battle-Baptiste has participated in archaeological excavations at Colonial Williamsburg, The Hermitage, the Rich Neck Plantation in Virginia the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and the Millars Plantation on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. Battle-Baptiste was named the new Director of W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst in January 2015. “The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the UMass Amherst Libraries was established in 2009 to engage the nation and the world in discussion and scholarship about the global issues involving race, labor, and social justice.”