Whitney Battle-Baptiste

Whitney Battle-Baptiste is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the UMass Amherst. Raised in the Bronx, New York, she brings an activist-scholar perspective to her work, integrating Black Studies, history, and historical archaeology to critically interrogate the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality across time and place. Her research is grounded in historically significant and politically charged sites throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Her work challenges traditional archaeological narratives and centers Black feminist theory, lived experience, and social justice. She is the author of Black Feminist Archaeology and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. She is currently working on a volume, titled The New Vanguard: Du Boisian Legacies and the Future of Black Intellectual Thought, one of the first publications to highlight the scholarship of Du Bois Center scholars.