Dr. Cécile Yézou
Black Studies Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow
Baylor Interdisciplinary Core
BIC Courses: Examined Life I, World of Rhetoric, and Social World
Education
Ph.D., W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2023.
M.A., W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2019.
M.A. in American History, Université Sorbonne – Paris IV, 2015.
B.A. in French Language, and American History & Literature, Université Sorbonne – Paris IV, 2013.
Research Interests
My research and teaching are deeply rooted in Black Studies’ interdisciplinarity, and engage History, Critical Trauma Studies, and Black Feminist Thought. Broadly, my work centers first-hand narratives and marginalized voices whose contributions complicate our understanding of the historical record, and contemporary society. I am very interested in archives, what narratives they preserve, what violence they enact, as well as the possibilities they offer for future scholarship. I teach courses on the Civil Rights Movement, Black Women in U.S. History, the Jim Crow South, Black Feminist Thought, and the introduction to Black Studies.
My forthcoming book project is tentatively titled A ‘Very Jim Crow’ Experience: Black Women’s World-Making in the Wake of Racialized Sexual Violence in the U.S. South, 1894-1947. It examines racialized sexual violence’s presence and impact in Black women and girls’ lives in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana during the first half of the 20th century. “A ‘Very Jim Crow’ Experience” argues that Black women and girls developed resistance, protective and survival strategies against sexual violence, informed by generational wisdom, and their awareness of sexual violence’s centrality to the white supremacist agenda post-Reconstruction. In doing so, this work identifies the Jim Crow South as a conflict zone, where white supremacists sought to reestablish racial hierarchy through terroristic acts. Looking at sexual violence against Black women and girls demonstrates how intertwined conceptions of power, violence, masculinity and sexuality were central to the building of the New South. My research has been funded by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as the African American Policy Forum through a Research & Writing Fellowship within their #SayHerName Campaign.
I am the archivist for A Long Walk Home (ALWH), a national art organization based in Chicago that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. I also have been an editor and researcher for the following projects: Traci Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Marcia McWilliams-Walker and Traci Parker, The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience and Justice. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023); Kimberlé Crenshaw and AAPF, #Sayhername: Black Women's Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. (Haymarket Books, Forthcoming 2024).
Selected Publications
A ‘Very Jim Crow’ Experience: Black Women’s World-Making in the Wake of Racialized Sexual Violence in the U.S. South, 1894-1947. (book manuscript in preparation)
“The #SafeAtWork Campaign: A Graduate Student Effort to End Sexual Violence in STEM,” co-authored with Bryant, R.; Golden, N. A.; Ellis, C. L.; Vander Linden, A.; Labastide, J., American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2019.
“Black Women’s Resistance to Sexual Violence,” Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). March 22, 2019.