Welcoming P. Gabrielle Foreman to the Muster Team

We are pleased to announce the addition of a new correspondent to our Muster team, P. Gabrielle Foreman. Gabrielle recently moved to Penn State from the University of Delaware where she was the founding faculty director of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project. At Penn State, she’ll launch and direct the Center for Black Digital Research. That Center, also called #DigBlk, will house the Colored Conventions Project as well as Douglass Day and the new Black Women’s Organizing Archive. Gabrielle is a poet’s daughter turned literary historian. She is finishing a monograph called The Art of DisMemory: Historicizing Slavery in Poetry, Print and Material Culture as well as an edited collection called Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake about the enslaved master poet and potter whose work appears in museums across North America. The volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, the first collection on this early Civil Rights movement that spanned seven decades, is forthcoming with UNC Press. For Muster, she’ll be writing about digital and distributed archive building, nineteenth-century Black organizing, Black memory and the arts, and Black history’s continued hold on the present. Gabrielle holds an endowed chair in Liberal Arts and is Professor of English, African American Studies and History as well as affiliate faculty at the Penn State University Library. She’ll be the Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society in 2021-2022.