Chambers Fellows

Caitlin Reed Wiesner

"Breaking the Silence, Healing Themselves: Black Women's Stories from the Anti-Rape Movement"

Dr. Caitlin Wiesner is currently Assistant Professor of History at Mercy University in Dobbs Ferry, NY, where she specializes in the history of race, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth century United States. She earned her Bachelor of the Arts with Distinguished Honors in History and Women's & Gender Studies from The College of New Jersey in 2015. She completed her PhD in Women’s & Gender History and African American History at Rutgers University in 2021 under the direction of Johanna Schoen. 

Dr. Wiesner has published her research as articles in The Journal of Women's History and Modern American History and peer-reviewed chapters in Scarlet and Black, Volumes I and II (Rutgers University Press, 2016 and 2020) and The Nursing Clio Reader (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming). Her research has been supported by the Graduate School of New Brunswick, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers Oral History Archives, Smith College Libraries, the Philanthropic Education Organization (P.E.O) International, and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. 

Dr. Wiesner is currently at work on a book manuscript based on her dissertation,  which is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime examines how Black anti-rape organizers critically engaged both the feminist movement against sexual violence and the federal War on Crime between 1974 and 1994. These women inflected Black women’s longstanding tradition of community-based caring labor with the Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and state violence. Their multifaceted and adaptable brand of anti-rape advocacy was premised on sustaining the survival of Black women as individuals and Black communities more broadly, and countered the increasingly carceral insistence within the feminist movement against sexual violence that invasive policing was the only viable solution to rape.

Pamela Walker

"Down in the Delta: Oral Histories from a Hallowed Home"

Dr. Pamela Walker is an Assistant Professor of African American History at the University of Vermont. She received her doctorate in African American and Women’s History from Rutgers University – New Brunswick. She has an M.A. in history from the University of New Orleans and a B.A. from the University of Tennessee –Knoxville. The grandchild and daughter of rural Mississippians, she was led to study history by asking questions about the origins of the fabric scraps in my grandmother’s apron. Broadly, her work examines motherhood, race, activism, benevolence, ideas about the “South,” epistolary writing and political consciousness in 1960s-era social movement networks. She is currently working on a book titled Signed, Sealed, Delivered: How Black and White Mothers used the Box Project and the Postal System to Fight Hunger and Feed the Mississippi Freedom Movement, which is under contract with the University of North Caroline Press. Signed, Sealed, Delivered tells a new and illuminating story of ordinary Black and white women’s overlooked participation in the modern Civil Rights Movement using one of the nation’s largest federal agencies: the U.S. Postal System.

Dr. Walker's article on Mississippi mothers, the welfare state, and the postal system was published in a special edition of Gender & History in January 2023, and she has contributed co-written articles to all three volumes of the award-winning Scarlet & Black Project at Rutgers University. She is a 2023 recipient of the ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship and the 2023 NASEM Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her work has also been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the PEO Sisterhood and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.