Kelsey Moore
Kelsey Alejandra Moore is a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of African American History and Black Studies.
Her work focuses on rural black southern histories, raising questions about religion, culture, and development in the 20th century. Her current book project, Black Benthic: Submerged Matters and Conjure Knowledge in the Santee-Cooper Basin, examines black experiences with the New Deal era Santee-Cooper and Hydroelectric and Navigation Project.
As an inaugural 2022-2023 Crossroads Research Fellow based at Princeton University, Moore created “We Just Don’t Trust Our Memories to Stone,” a digital project that remaps cemeteries flooded by the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project. In doing so, the digital project remembers various Conjure knowledge(s) necessary to the lives and deaths of black South Carolinians. She also created “a fugitive’s map of the black south” and “finding the dead: another kind of fugitive map” as digital meditations on black place-making.
Moore's research on the flooded cemeteries in the Santee-Cooper Basin has been featured in Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories that Changed the World.
Her research has received support from Carter G. Woodson Institute in African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.
Moore received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. She received a Dual B.A. in Africana Studies and Public Policy at New York University, where she graduated summa cum laude as the 2019 Valedictorian of the College and Arts and Science.
When Moore is not reading and writing, she enjoys baking and spending time with her two cats.