Whitney Battle-Baptiste

African diaspora theory, Black Feminist theory, African American expressive and material culture, historical archaeology, African diaspora archaeology, critical heritage studies, cultural landscapes. North America & Caribbean

Whitney Battle-Baptiste, is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst. A native of the Bronx, New York, Dr. Battle-Baptiste is an activist-scholar who sees the classroom and campus as a space to engage contemporary issues with a sensibility of the past. Her academic training is in Black study, history and historical archaeology.  Her research critically engages the interconnectedness of race, gender, class, and sexuality through an archaeological lens.  Her research sites  include Andrew Jackson's Hermitage Plantation, the Abiel Smith School on Beacon Hill in Boston, the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite (or House of the Black Burghardts) in Great Barrington, MA, and a community-based heritage site at Millars Plantation, on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. Her books include, Black Feminist Archaeology (2011), W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (2018), co-edited with Britt Rusert. She is currently completing the second edition of Black Feminist Archaeology with Routledge and co-edited a volume on new directions in research about W. E. B. Du Bois with University of UMass Press. Dr. Battle-Baptiste serves as the Chair of the Black Advisory Council at UMass Amherst, President of the American Anthropological Association (2023-2025), and the 2024/2025 Charles Norton Memorial Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America.