Former Richards Center postdoctoral fellow Nicole Myers Turner has accepted a tenure track appointment in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. In the 2015-2016 academic year, Dr. Turner was the Center’s postdoctoral fellow in African American history. Following her fellowship, she earned an assistant professorship in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. During her year with the Richards Center, Dr. Turner began revising her dissertation into a book manuscript. That book, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in March 2020. Using local archives, church records, denominational convention minutes, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, Soul Liberty visualizes how black churches in postemancipation Virginia organized geographic networks of black religious and political influence and examines black churches’ active role in the political project of “crafting, defining, and teaching freedom” among freed people. Dr. Turner will begin her appointment at Yale on January 1.