Keynote

Dr. Melissa N. Stuckey
University of South Carolina

Dr. Melissa N. Stuckey is an award-winning scholar of African American history at the University of South Carolina, where she serves as Director of Public History in the History Department. She is leading a $2.5 million rehabilitation and repurposing of a historic Rosenwald School building on the campus of Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. Stuckey is also involved in public history projects in South Carolina and Oklahoma. Stuckey is author of several articles and book chapters, including “Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All-Black Town,” (Journal of African American History, 2017) and “Freedom on Her Own Terms: California M. Taylor and Black Womanhood in Boley, Oklahoma” published in This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma, 1870s to 2010s (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021). Stuckey is completing her first book, entitled “All Men Up”: Seeking Freedom in the All-Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, which interrogates the black freedom struggle in Oklahoma as it took shape in the state’s largest all-black town and an article on the ECSU Rosenwald School rehabilitation.