Assistant Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL

Dr. Kimberly C. Ransom is an interdisciplinary historian who studies the History of African American Education and the History of Childhood. Her research examines the oral histories and material objects of Black children who once attended segregated schools in the Deep South during the Jim Crow Era (1940-1969). As a public scholar and artist, Kimberly also uses her historical research to create public exhibits related to African American childhood in and around schools. In her most recent project, she has worked in partnership with her dissertation respondents to create a local museum, the Historic Pickensville Rosenwald School Museum & Community Center, which is the sole remaining Rosenwald Schoolhouse in Pickens County, Alabama. Her scholarship seeks to illuminate the unique ways Black children have taken up childhood despite having been marginalized from childhood status in America, particularly in and around schools. Through her research and public-facing projects Kimberly also aims to demonstrate what can be learned from Black schoolchildren’s agency to imagine and influence the social and cultural world of schooling via their embodiments and articulations of childhood in the past.