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 race, religion, and culture in the 20th century. Her current book, What the Dead Witnessed, interrogates how rural development in South Carolina’s Santee-Cooper basin inflicted spiritual, ecological, and epistemic violence against black and indigenous peoples. Through a close examination of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project, What the Dead Witnessed demonstrates how the ritualistic nature of modernization collapsed various notions of time, space, and place.
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.
Before coming to Georgetown, 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.