Transatlantic Blackness in the Era of Jim Crow: Race and Gender in the Life of an African American Expatriate

This project is a biography of an African American woman expatriate who settled in London after World War II, trained as a psychoanalyst, and became a well-known analyst and fellow at Cambridge University. 

The student research partner would assist with archival research, particularly looking for the subject’s connections to Anna Freud, child psychoanalysis, and the Hampstead Clinic in London. We would investigate how life was like for African Americans in postwar Europe, particularly in the UK, beginning with the time of the subject’s work for the International Refugee Organization in Germany, and later in London and Cambridge. We would also examine scholarship in psychoanalysis during this period to understand her training and intellectual community. 

Student assistance would be enormously helpful in finding resources, navigating Harvard's library system, digging through archives, and evaluating resources. The student will learn a great deal about collecting and analyzing primary materials, and how to fit together the pieces of a biography.