Charlene J. Fletcher '14
Charlene J. Fletcher '14
Ph.D. candidate in history at Indiana University-Bloomington
My areas of research are 19th-century U.S., African American, and women's history.
In what ways do you feel your master's degree in history helped to prepare you for further graduate study and/or your current career?
The M.A. in history gave me a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to study and an overview of the methodologies available to approach my topic. From there, I had a clearer vision of why I wanted to pursue my Ph.D. and what research I sought to pursue. Each year of doctoral study has helped me build and expand my research interests into a viable dissertation topic, and a possible book, but I developed that foundation in the M.A. program.
Are you currently engaged in historical research? Tell us about your current research project.
My current research explores the experiences of confined African American women in Kentucky from Reconstruction to the Progressive Era, specifically illuminating the lives of confined black women by examining places other than carceral locales as arenas of confinement, including mental health asylums and domestic spaces. I seek to explore how these women both defied and defined confinement through their incarceration; interactions with public, social, and political entities of the period; and how they challenged Victorian ideas of race and femininity in Kentucky.
I am definitely a historian of the African American experience, women, and the U.S. South. While my dissertation centers on confinement in Kentucky, the project has led me to follow the rabbit hole to more on legal history and politics, African American life and spirituality, and social activism in the American South. My master's thesis research explored the race riots of the Red Summer of 1919 and the implementation and consequences of the use of martial law during the 1918 and 1919 race riots in Charleston, South Carolina.
Which history course or courses were particularly meaningful to you during your time in the Brooklyn College History Department? Why?
I enjoyed course work at Brooklyn College, but the class that left the greatest impression on me was Medieval Europe, with Dr. Lauren Mancia. I had no background in European history, and Dr. Mancia not only combined the archive with material culture, but her course allowed me to explore my own interests in women's history through an unfamiliar lens. It was fantastic. Even as an Americanist, I still return to the methods and ideas gleaned from Dr. Mancia's course.
