Meet Dr. Gabrielle Foreman
As a scholar, author, and collaborator, I create communities of care based on the principles of collective empowerment and institutional equity.
P. Gabrielle Foreman is an award-winning educator, scholar, author, mentor, and MacArthur Fellow. A leader in Black digital and public history, she is also known for her long-standing commitment to co-creating and working in collectives and to institution and community building.
Dr. Foreman is a poet's daughter and interdisciplinary scholar who hails from the South Side of Chicago and Venice, California. She has published five books and editions and is the author of numerous essays that challenge received disciplinary and institutional orthodoxies.
Her teaching and scholarship address issues of race, reform, and resistance in the nineteenth century. As part of her commitment to creating, sustaining, empowering, and recovering collectives working for inclusion, equity, and justice, she focuses on illuminating the past’s continuing hold on the world we live in today.
“We need to grapple with the fact that history isn’t progressive, that things don’t get better because time has passed. Things get better because of deep, continuous, complex engagement with justice issues.”
Diversifying higher education
Dr. Foreman has long been recognized for her commitment and contributions to institution-building in ways that attend to equity issues and ensuring that first-gen and students and faculty of color are supported and empowered across disciplines and rank throughout their entire careers. Through creating collectives and partnerships, co-directing high-profile collaborative projects, and cultivating individual and group mentoring and coaching, she dedicates significant time and energy to diversifying higher education. She advocates and empowers people and institutions to:
Account for economic inequities in recruitment and retention
Increase structural support for historically under-represented students, faculty, and community partners
Extend the reach, access, and impact of African American scholars and scholarship to public stakeholders
Include the public in the work of finding and preserving records of communities whose histories have been disregarded by traditional institutions and practices
Currently, Dr. Foreman is serving as the Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar for the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar program. She chose to visit the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities with PBK chapters and will be working to address the small numbers of chapters currently on HBCU campuses.
She also addresses issues of institutional equity and pipeline-building through keynotes and as a workshop facilitator.
Community. Collectives. Collaboration.
Professor Foreman is known for her long-standing commitment to building, contributing to, and working in collectives, as well as exploring innovative ways to build and strengthen community within and beyond the academy.
She is the founding faculty director of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project and a founding co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk at Penn State University. Both the Colored Conventions Project and #DigBlk are made up of graduate student leaders, librarians, satellite faculty, and arts and community partners.
For a decade, Dr. Foreman has also been part of a collective led by Lynnette Young Overby that engages choreographers, poets, student researchers, and community members in bringing early Black history to the stage. This collaboration has led to the innovative volume, Praise Songs for Dave the Potter, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2022.
