Past Research 

Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory

2021 Exhibition Contributor, Special Collections Research Assistant (Toni Morrison Papers)

Researched the Toni Morrison Papers in assistance to exhibition planning for a Princeton University Library exhibition and assisted in crafting the curatorial direction of the exhibition. Focused specifically on the files for Sula and The Bluest Eye.

Entitled to Freedom: Black Women in the Mississippi Southern Claims Commission

MPhil Dissertation 2020

The Southern Claims Commission was created in March of 1871 to repay Union sympathizers living in the South for property taken by the Union Army during the Civil War. This dissertation is the first study solely focused on the experiences of Black women in the Southern Claims Commission. The approved claims of Black women in Mississippi act as the central archive. These files illustrate that during the Civil War and Reconstruction Black women articulated a political sensibility based on collective emancipation and demanded a reciprocal relationship with the federal government. Though the files range from 1871 to 1876, the full story stretches from the antebellum period to Reconstruction. A robust story emerges from the files, freed and enslaved women owned property prior to emancipation and argued for material repayment during Reconstruction. Twenty Black women demonstrated a growing politic of critical entitlement as they existed outside of prescribed racialized and gendered boundaries and negotiated the conditions of their freedom. Her supervisor was Stephen Tuck.

Moral Treason and Black Civil War Widows in the 19th Century

Undergraduate Senior Thesis 2018

Mimi was a Mellon Mays Fellow, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship is a national research fellowship for scholarship in humanities and social sciences established to address the underrepresentation of minorities in the professoriate and support fellows in the process of entering the academy. She conducted a historical exploration into denied widow pensions from the Civil War which provide insight into the early welfare state as a regime that policed and surveilled Black women’s intimate lives. During emancipation, the Pensions Bureau criminalized adulterous cohabitation as a high stake moral infraction that tied Black women’s access to citizenship to their sexuality and their husbands.  In response to invasive pension laws widows utilized techniques of diversion, distraction, creative storytelling, and active community action to limit the surveillance and access of the Pension Bureau to their intimate life. Overall, her thesis explored the relationship between black women’s intimate lives and the state.  She worked under the mentorship of Dr. Iver Bernstein.

Northwestern University Summer Research Opportunity Program

Summer 2017

The Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) is an eight-week competitive research experience at Northwestern University for sophomores and juniors from colleges and universities across the United States.  Mimi worked with Dr. Jennifer Nash within the African American Studies Department to produce a research paper entitled "The Possibility of Desire: Sexual Choice within US Colored Troops Widow’s Pensions."  The paper utilized denied Widow’s Pensions as a method for historcizing freed black women’s decision-making processes and sexual choices. 

Fulbright Commission-University of Bristol Summer Institute

Summer 2016

Mimi spent a month in 2016 studying at the University of Bristol participating in an International Summer School through the Fulbright US-UK Commission in the Institute of Slavery and the Atlantic Heritage.  As part of the institute she produced a final research project entitled, Obscuring the "Jason": Subverting the Archive through Poetry in which she used the Jason Gally Account which records an entire slaving voyage in the 1740’s from Bristol to Angola, to write an erasure poem in an attempt to transform a harrowing document into an arena of generational healing and growth.  The final project was presented to a group of faculty including Dr. Cassie Newland.

Documenting Ferguson, Research Assistant  

2015-2016 School Year

Documenting Ferguson is a freely available resource that seeks to preserve and make accessible the digital media captured and created by community members following the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.  The project has the ultimate goal of providing diverse perspectives on the events in Ferguson and the resulting social dialogue.  Mimi conducted and transcribed interviews of local activists and community members.  She worked under the guidance of Dr. Clarissa Rile Hayward and Dr. Jeffrey Q. McCune.