About the Series
Imagining a new field of discourse is at the heart of this series. Scholars have long written about African Americans who left the rural South for more urban locales. However, little has been published outside the context of enslavement about those who, by choice or circumstance, lived their entire lives in the rural South. An understanding of how race, history, culture, gender, and economy informed and shaped rural lives is critical to a deeper analysis of how Black people saw and imagined themselves in rural spaces and is additionally lacking in the extant, albeit limited, scholarship.
Rural Black Studies provides space for emerging, junior, or senior scholars engaged in research that foregrounds and studies the intersectionality of Black rural life to publish exciting and groundbreaking work. Situated in African American history, books in this series will contribute to our understanding of how agrarian Black life was informed by historical and contemporary events.
About the Editors
Cherisse Jones-Branch
Professor of History (Arkansas State University)
Cherisse Jones-Branch is Dean of the Graduate School at Arkansas State University, where she has been on the faculty of the History Department since 2003. She is the author or editor of several books, including Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (University of Georgia Press), Crossing the Line: Women’s Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II (University Press of Florida), and Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965 (University of Arkansas Press).
Yulonda Eadie-Sano
Assistant Professor of History (Alcorn State University)
Yulonda Eadie Sano is assistant professor of history in the Department of Social Sciences at Alcorn State University, where she teaches courses in American, African American, and world history. She holds a PhD in history from The Ohio State University, and her research focuses on the social history of medicine and the desegregation of secondary schools in Mississippi. Her scholarship on physician Edith Mae Irby Jones and the integration of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine appears in Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (University of Georgia Press, 2018), and her study of lay midwives and public health in Mississippi was published in Agricultural History (Summer 2019).