In the first of eight Fellow Talks in Spring 2026 hosted by Slavery North, PhD candidate in Afro-American Studies Olivia Haynes shares her archival research on the role of Black women’s labor during the Philadelphia 1793 yellow fever epidemic.
This hybrid talk is open to students, faculty, staff, and members of the public.
Date/Time: Thursday, March 12, 2026, 2:30-3:30 PM (EST)
Location: Room 301, Herter Hall, 161 Presidents Drive, UMass Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003
Online via Zoom: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/93902049760
Meeting ID: 939 0204 9760
Speaker: Olivia Haynes, Graduate Student Fellow, 2025-26
Moderator: Dr. Martha McNamara, Associate Professor of Public History & Associate Director Slavery North
Called to Care: Black Women in Epidemic Philadelphia
Bio: Olivia Haynes is a PhD candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also completed the graduate certificate in Public History. Her research examines Black women’s labour, care, and claims to belonging in the early American North, with a focus on the lives of enslaved and free Black midwives, mothers, and healers. Grounded in Black feminist theory, social reproduction theory, disability studies, and critical archival practices her work reimagines how we understand reproduction, community, survival, and Black futurity under slavery and its legacies. She has curated and contributed to exhibitions at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum and the University Museum of Contemporary Art, and her writing appears in The Massachusetts Review and Chrysalis: A Critical Student Journal of Transformative Art History.
For more information, please contact Emily Davidson (Director of Research and Engagement, Slavery North): emilydavidso@umass.edu
