Battle-Baptiste Named Spotlight Scholar

As a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas, Whitney Battle-Baptiste walked into her advisor’s office one day brandishing a hefty folder of anthropological research on captive Africans. Her advisor’s reaction? “How is this going to help the liberation of black people?”

“That question really threw me,” says Battle-Batiste, a professor in the department of anthropology and director of the university library’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center. It also helped spark her interest in engaged scholarship that speaks to real-world issues.