Dr. Teona Williams is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography. Her work revolves around Black Geographies, 20th century African American and environmental history, and Black feminist theory. Her current work explores the role of disaster and hunger, in shaping Black feminist ecologies from 1930-1990s. Specifically, she follows a cadre of rural Black feminists who articulated visions of food sovereignty, overhauled antiblack disaster relief, and vigorously fought for universal basic income, radical land reform, and food and clean water access as a human right. Prior to Rutgers, she received her doctoral degree at Yale University in the departments of African American Studies and History. She also completed a master’s degree in environmental justice at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. In 2017, she won the Clyde Woods Prize for best graduate paper in Black Geographies, for her paper “Build A Wall Around Hyde Park:” Race, Space and Policing on the Southside of Chicago 1950-2010, published by The Antipode in March 2020. She is the author of the essay “Islands of Freedom: The struggle to desegregate Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain National Park 1936-1941” in the forthcoming edited collection Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, Environmental History which will be released in 2024.
- Research Interests: Black geographies, Black feminism, African American and environmental history, Black Ecologies, critical food studies, critical disaster studies, the Black South(s), and rural geographies
- Curriculum Vitae
- Degrees: (Ph.D., Yale University)
Courses
- 10:498 - Journalism IV