About

My research project aims to critically analyze and provide new insight into the European study abroad experiences, accomplishments, and legacies of pioneering African American women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, their trailblazing educational achievements at elite European institutions remain overlooked in American Studies literature.

I show how they used their initiative and agency as former slaves and free women and began to study abroad in Europe from the mid-1800s. Despite facing barriers of slavery, anti-literacy laws, race, gender, and doctrines of scientific intellectual inferiority, these women dared to challenge the prevailing attitudes of their time and place which restricted Black women’s access to higher education.

The thesis focuses on four case studies. They are: abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond (1824- 1876), international civil rights activist and clubwoman Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), educator, author, activist, and feminist pioneer Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), and diplomacy and disarmament expert Merze Tate (1905-1996). These women merit research and recognition not solely because of their contributions to the struggle for racial justice but also because of their determination to pursue higher education abroad. They boldly resisted their raced and gendered roles assigned at birth by a White patriarchal hegemony and dispelled the myth of Black female intellectual inferiority.

In this interdisciplinary study, I investigate how the four women negotiated issues of race, gender, and class and how their study abroad experiences informed their lives, careers, and roles as transnational activists. I employ historical case study to analyze these experiences and how their legacies can empower contemporary Black women who are underrepresented in study abroad. My research draws upon archives, memoirs, autobiographies, historic newspapers, and personal papers to create a space for new knowledge that contributes to a richer understanding of Black female resistance in the context of study abroad.