Contact Information

Office Hours

• Tuesday 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
• Thursday 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
• Note:

Biography

Dr. Abena Boakyewa-Ansah is a historian of US history with a specialized interest in Black women's worlds, lives, and ideas of freedom in the Civil War era. A first-generation Afro-Caribbean and Black British scholar, she began her work at the University of Edinburgh, studying with Civil War historian David Silkenat. Her undergraduate thesis became her first publication in 2017, "Crafted 'By Their Own Hands:' The African American Religious Experience in Union-Occupied North Carolina, 1862-1865," in The North Carolina Historical Review. Abena then attended Vanderbilt University, where she completed her doctorate in history as the last student of Professor Richard Blackett in 2022. Her dissertation, "Freedom Was Their North Star: Formerly Enslaved Women's Efforts to Secure and Define Freedom During the American Civil War," places enslaved women at the forefront of the battle for Black freedom, seeking to recast them as freedom makers rather than passive recipients of freedom. Specializing in Civil War history, Abena developed her research interests in African-American religious history, Black women's intellectual landscape and feminist ideas, and innovative research methods for diving deeper into the interiority of the enslaved.

Dr. Boakyewa-Ansah is passionate about bridging the gap between academia and the public and so has co-hosted a podcast and teaching groups related to Black women's Christian history in the US context. Additionally, she developed a curriculum for Metro Nashville K-12 schools on the diverse history of Tennessee, and currently reviews textbooks for upcoming African American history AP curriculum. As a scholar who is passionate about pedagogy, Dr. Boakyewa-Ansah completed a teaching fellowship at Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching and an intensive summer teaching residency with the National Humanities Center in 2021, developing her skillset for the modern classroom.

Curriculum Vitae