Kelsey Alejandra Moore is an Assistant Professor of African American History and Black Studies at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on rural black southern histories, raising questions about black religion, culture, and development in the twentieth century. Her current book project, Black Benthic: Submerged Matters and Conjure Knowledge in the Santee-Cooper Basin, interrogates how rural development in South Carolina’s Santee-Cooper basin inflicted spiritual, ecological, and epistemic violence against black and indigenous peoples.

 

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. 

 

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.

 

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. 

 

She enjoys baking and spending time with her cats, Liberation and Abolition.

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Publications: 

"We Just Don't Trust Our Memories to Stone"

  https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/moore