When Dr. Kabria Baumgartner went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to earn her Ph.D., she thought she was going to study 20th century African diasporic literature.
Then she took a seminar on early African American history, and she found herself fascinated by a different time period altogether. It led her to the research she does today on free African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries.
“I just wanted to know a little bit more about what life was like for them,” she says. “I also just wanted to know what those communities look like. I wanted to think about their activism.”
She found that the North wasn’t the “beacon of racial equality” she expected, which only pushed her to delve deeper.
“It’s part of the learning process,” she says. “You come to it sometimes with assumptions, and you realize ‘Wait, those assumptions are wrong. I need to study more and learn more.’ And then it sort of enlightens you. To me, that’s fun.”
That attitude undergirds her work as an assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Hampshire, where she focuses on gender, race and education in the American antebellum Northeast.
In her first book — In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America — she studied some of the earliest school desegregation cases. She saw that her assumptions about who these women became and what forces shaped them weren’t always what she thought they would be.
