The Richards Center is excited to share that Allison Mitchell and Hannah Hicks will join us as postdoctoral scholars for the 2024–25 academic year. Allison will be the Richards Center/Africana Research Center Postdoctoral Scholar in African American History and Hannah will be the Richards Center Postdoctoral Scholar in the Civil War Era. We can’t wait to have these two fantastic scholars with us at Penn State!

Allison Mashell Mitchell will receive her Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia, and specializes in twentieth-century African American history, focusing on Black electoral politics, political realignment, southern history, and civil rights studies. Her dissertation, “Battle for the Ballot: A History of Black Electoral Politics and Voter Suppression in Florida, 1940-2000s” uses Florida as a case study to analyze the role of Black Americans in political realignment in the South from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright ruling to the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. Along the way, it traces Black Floridians’ tumultuous relationship with the Democratic Party and capricious interactions with the GOP since World War Two. She challenges the traditional periodization and white American-centered narratives of political realignment scholarship by emphasizing points of contention in state-level and southern politics that display the inherent failure of the U.S. two-party system. Allison received her BA in History and African American Studies at the University of Florida. Her work has been supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, and the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University.

Hannah Katherine Hicks received her PhD in History from Vanderbilt University and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, focusing on women and law and the intersections of gender, medicine, and law. Her dissertation, “Troubling Justice: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War South” draws on county-level court records to examine criminal courts in postbellum South Carolina and the primarily working-class Black and White women who frequently appeared in them as defendants, complainants, and witnesses. At the Richards Center, Hannah will work on turning this dissertation into a book manuscript. Hannah was most recently an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at UNC Charlotte, which is also her undergraduate alma mater. In Winter 2022, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine published her article entitled “A Conjure Woman in Court: African American Conjurers as Health Practitioners and Performative Poisoners in the Post-Emancipation South.” Hannah’s research has been supported by the American Historical Association, the South Caroliniana Library, the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.