Project Team

Dr. Imani Perry

BTA Co-Principal Investigator, Co-Founding Director

Harvard University Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies

Dr. Perry is the co-founding faculty director of the Black Teacher Archive.  A scholar of cultural studies, legal and cultural history and African American studies, she is the author of nine books, including South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Discovery the Soul of a Nation (HarperCollins, 2022), which won the 2022 National Book Award, as well as May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (UNC Press, 2018), which won the 2018 John Hope Franklin Award from the American Studies Association, Looking for the Lorraine: The Radiant and Racial Life of Lorraine Hansberry(Beacon, 2018) which received the Pen Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Phi Beta Kappa Award and the Lambda Literary Award and Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Duke, 2018.) Professor Perry is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow and has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Pew Foundations. She has written for numerous publications, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Oxford American, Harper’s, and The Bitter Southerner. Perry has offered commentary on African American history, literature, and the politics of race on MSNBC, CNN, and a host of documentaries.

Dr. Jarvis R. Givens

BTA Co-Principal Investigator, Co-Founding Director

Harvard University Professor of Education and African & African American Studies

Dr. Givens is the co-founding faculty director of the Black Teacher Archive. His work explores 19th and 20th-century African American history, the history of education, and the interplay between race, power, and schooling. Professor Givens is the author of four books. They include: I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (Harper, 2026), American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (Harper, 2025), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (Beacon Press, 2023), and Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021), which won several awards including the American Education Research Association’s 2022 Outstanding Book Award, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s 2022 ASALH Book Prize, and the History of Education Society’s 2022 Outstanding Book Award. Professor Givens’s work has been published in various outlets, including American Educational Research Journal, The Journal of African American History, Harvard Educational Review, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and more.

Micha Broadnax

BTA Senior Project Manager

Micha Broadnax is a memory worker and archival strategist coordinating the efforts of the Black Teacher Archive. Inspired by Black feminist imaginations and space-making, she pursued the library profession to explore archiving as a practice of care and community building. Working across the Harvard ecosystem and with colleagues across the nation, Micha engineered the social and communal infrastructure necessary to actualize the project. With a background in preserving and improving access to information in academic, community, personal, and corporate repositories, they have held positions at Mount Holyoke College, Converse, Emerson College, and Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Erica Buddington

BTA Content Fellow

Erica Buddington is an educator, writer, and an incoming PhD student in Culture, Institutions & Society at Harvard Graduate School and Education. She is also the founder and CEO of the Langston League. For the Black Teacher Archive, she has designed feature pages including Archive in Blue, May We Forever Stand, the homepage flashcards, and leads the project's social media. Her research centers Black women educators from the 19th and 20th century.

Dr. Rebecca Horwitz-Willis

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr. Horwitz-Willis is the 2024-2026 Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School and leads the BTA Teaching Partners Program. She researches the history of education rights through the experiences of Black teachers, students, and local school officials, and she teaches in the areas of the history of education, education law and policy, and constitutional law. Drawing on her experience as a high school teacher and instructional coach, she collaborates with educators to develop curriculum that centers primary sources and connects students with the rich history of Black teachers' leadership and advocacy for education rights. 

This custom website for the Black Teacher Archive was made possible through the technical expertise of colleagues in DARTH.

Rashmi Singhal

Director, Arts and Humanities Research Computing

David Flood

Software Engineer

Ryan Muther

Software Engineer

Tracy Stuber

Digital Humanities Specialist

Cara Buzzell

Designer

Staff

Carla Lillvik, Special Collections & Research Librarian for Gutman Library, BTA Project Liaison (2019-2024)

Graduate Research Assistants

Charlene Mandimutsira (summer 2025)

Sydnie Alvaun (summer 2025)

Mia Sturdivant (summer 2025)

Jordan Rhym (summer 2025)

MarQuis Bullock (summer 2023)

Morgan Forde (summer 2023)

Jaminque Adams (fall 2023)

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Eden Wolde

Cassidy McClellan

Abigail Goldstein '21

Farah Afify '22

Luna Pham '23