Beatrice Adams

• African American History
• Migration History
• Black Women’s History
• African Diaspora History
• History of American South
• Slavery and the University

I am a historian of race, migration, and social movements with a particular interest in how racial and regional identities intersect to shape African Americans’ experiences of freedom and belonging. My work explores what motivated African Americans to remain in the South during the Great Migration and what motivated African Americans to return to the region in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.

• African American History
• Modern Black Freedom Movement

Book Chapters

“‘I Hereby Bequeath…’Excavating the Enslaved from the Wills of the Early Leaders of Queen’s College” and “From the Classroom to the American Colonization Society: Making Race at Rutgers,” Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, eds. Marisa Fuentes and Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University Press, 2016.

“The Rutgers Race Man: Early Black Students at Rutgers College,” Scarlet and Black Volume II, Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865-1945, eds. Marisa Fuentes and Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University Press, 2020.

“A Second Founding: The Black and Puerto Rican Student Revolution at Rutgers-Camden and Rutgers-Newark,” Scarlet and Black Volume III, eds. Marisa Fuentes and Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University Press, Rutgers University Press, 2021.

Articles-in-Progress

“People Were Forever Coming and Going: Habitual Return and Claiming a Southern African American Homeland,” Southern Cultures. (Under review)

Mellon Graduate Fellowships in the Humanities, Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2020-2021

The Ford Foundation Minority Dissertation Fellowship, Alternate, 2019-2020

Neal Ira Rosenthal History Travel Award, Rutgers University, 2017-2018

Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Graduate Fellow, Black Bodies, 2017-2018

John Hope Franklin Center for Documentary Studies, Research Fellow, Duke University, 2016-2017