Olivia M Hagedorn

Olivia M. Hagedorn is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studies women, gender, race, the Black Midwest, and the African diaspora. Her dissertation is titled, “Call Me African”: Black Women and Diasporic Cultural Feminism in Chicago, 1930-1980. It examines the diasporic cultural activism of four extraordinary Black Chicago women—Margaret Burroughs, Gwendolyn Brooks, Val Gray Ward, and Christine Johnson—from the Chicago Black Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement. In chronicling the lives of these women, her project demonstrates the significance of Chicago as a key site for the production of a diasporic cultural feminism that linked the Midwest to the African world. “Call Me African” thus extends the geographical scope of the African diaspora, identifies Black women as authoritative progenitors of internationalist thought, recognizes the expressive arts as repositories of diasporic thought and action, and provides a framework for reinterpreting Chicago’s history through diasporic and feminist lenses.

Her research has been recognized by Chicago’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium as well as the Humanities Research Institute at Illinois. In 2019, she was awarded the Smalley Fellowship in Gender and Women’s Studies for its innovative contributions to the study of gender, women, and sexualities studies. Professionally, she is a member of several scholarly associations. These include the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), the Midwestern History Association, and the Organization of American Historians.