Image: Meet new doctoral student Erleen Ellis! Ellis joined our graduate program this year with an Osborne Graduate Fellowship in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, which supports outstanding students in graduate studies. She will be working under the guidance of Dr. Cindy Hahamovitch, Ellis aims to fully flesh out connections between labor organizing and social mobilization for Black and Brown women in the southern United States in the context of the global oppression of subaltern labor. She will also work to extend their oral history research to other southern urban cities. Ellis received her M.A,in History at the University of New Orleans, and received B.A. in History and Cultural Studies from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. As a scholar of Black women’s labor history, US social welfare and care organizing, and global studies, she received departmental honors at UNO for her master’s work in African-American History by aiding in the curation of the “Don’t Stand Alone: Black Labor Organizing in New Orleans” public history exhibit. She has presented at conferences such as the Association of Black Women Historians, Labor and Working Class Historians Association, Southern Labor Studies Association, and Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Pursuing a doctoral degree in History at UGA will allow Ellis to facilitate continued research surrounding her master’s thesis titled “Rest if you must, but don’t quit: Black Women’s work and welfare in the New Orleans Welfare Rights Organization, 1970s-1990s.”
