Abigail Cooper, assistant professor of history at Brandeis University, has begun to uncover the powerful culture forged by freed people in refugee camps during and after the Civil War.
ABIGAIL COOPER
Abigail Cooper earned her B.A. from Columbia University, her MA in Religion from Yale Divinity School, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University, where she teaches courses in U.S. History, Slavery and Emancipation, Civil War and Reconstruction, Migration and Refugees, and new methods for writing history. Her work has received recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Virginia Historical Society. Cooper’s book, Pierced Dimes and Placenta Fires, is about how Black communities used folk knowledge to forge emancipation.
"When you feel dislocated out of a normality, you end up placing significance in different places." Abigail Cooper