I’m currently a second-year graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania. My passion is to disseminate diverse histories to the public, especially to marginalized groups, inside and outside of academic spaces through multimodal mediums such as film, digital media, fashion, and public history projects. In 2019, I was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to create an art installation for the opening of the New Africa Galleries. I created a dress, titled “Wearable Literature,” which uses art and embroidery to express the importance of ancestral communication and the principle of Sankofa in the design of the fabric.
I joined the Penn Slavery Project in Spring 2018. Through the Penn and Slavery Project’s Augmented Reality Mobile Tour App, I document the history of my family over five generations, from slavery to the present, set in contrast with the fortunes of my family’s enslavers which included two men who received medical degrees from Penn during the 19th century. I'm currently working on a documentary which centers my family as a microcosm of the southern Black experience from slavery to present day and explores issues of reparatory justice, intergenerational wealth and privilege, and legacies of inequality between the wealth, educational attainments, and resources of the families of white enslavers and the families of the enslaved.
You can learn more at breannamoore.com.
Advisors: Roquinaldo Ferreira and Kathleen Brown
B.A., International Relations and African Studies, University of Pennsylvania (2015)
My research interests include African cultural retention in the African diaspora, cultural foundations for valuing personhood, the spiritual world, and the natural world amongst pre-colonial and enslaved Africans, the history of the African diaspora, the transAtlantic slave trade, slavery, and African colonization.
TA, African Since 1800 (Fall 2020)
TA, American Origins (Spring 2021)
The Penn and Slavery Project
The Center for Experimental Ethnography
Price Lab for Digital Humanities