Rate My Professor Aleia Brown

Aleia M. Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at East Carolina University, having previously held the position of Whichard Distinguished Associate Professor of History. She earned her PhD in Public History from Middle Tennessee State University, MA in Public History from Northern Kentucky University, and BS in History (Summa Cum Laude) from Coppin State University. Brown's scholarship focuses on Black women’s history, museums, memory, material culture, and digital humanities, exploring Black women’s experiments with freedom. Her current book project, Disrupting the Loop of Recovery: Black Women’s Engagement with Textile Art and Political Thought, examines the solidarity economy and collaborative aesthetics in the 1960s Alabama Black Belt and Mississippi Delta, complemented by a VR project rooted in Black feminist love praxis. Her publications appear in Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Reviews in Digital Humanities, Museums & Social Issues, and The Black Scholar.

Prior to East Carolina University, Brown served as Vice President of Programs and Chief Curator at the National Women’s History Museum, Assistant Director of the African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities Initiative with affiliate faculty status in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, Program Manager and Public Fellow at the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers University-Newark—where she launched the Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice traveling exhibition—and Curator of African and African American History at the Michigan State University Museum, co-curating Ubuntutu: Life Legacies of Love and Action and co-authoring its catalog in 2016. She edited special issues on Black Digital Humanities in Reviews in Digital Humanities (volumes 3.4 and 3.5). Notable articles include “Black Scholars Matter: #BlkTwitterstorians Building a Digital Community” (The Black Scholar, 2017) and “On Race and Museums: Starting Conversations, Embracing Action” (Museums and Social Issues, 2015). Brown has received the African American Intellectual History Society’s CLR James Research Fellowship, Mellon-ACLS Public Fellowship, and a 2023–2024 Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her curatorial contributions include a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition on quilts by Black women artists.