Olivia Haynes

Olivia Haynes is a Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also completed the graduate certificate in Public History. Her research examines Black women’s labor, care, and claims to belonging in the early American North, with a focus on the lives of enslaved and free Black midwives, mothers, and healers. Grounded in Black feminist theory, social reproduction theory, disability studies, and critical archival practices her work reimagines how we understand reproduction, community, survival, and Black futurity under slavery and its legacies. She has curated and contributed to exhibitions at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum and the University Museum of Contemporary Art, and her writing appears in The Massachusetts Review and Chrysalis Black Maple Magazine. She is a Slavery North Graduate Fellow and a recipient of the Winthrop Fellowship in Colonial History from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.