Mellon Seminar: Tajah Ebram

Dr. Tajah Ebram will talk about her current work with The Black Bibliography Project (BBP). The BBP is creating a digital database of Black book history with the aim of revealing the dynamic social networks and aesthetic practices specific to Black print cultures in the U.S.  During her talk, she will discuss her background in Black literary and cultural studies and how this informs her current work with the BBP. Her current research with the project is focused on developing and curating, in collaboration with graduate researchers, a corpus centering the print cultures of books authored by incarcerated Black writers and organizers of the late 20th century. The talk will explore the print cultures of Black prison movements while also attending to critical political, ethical and descriptive considerations involved in developing data about these works and writers.

Dr. Tajah Ebram is a cultural historian, teacher and community memory worker. She is currently the Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers University New Brunswick and the Rutgers lead for the Black Bibliography Project. Prior to her work at Rutgers, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College where she developed seminars around Black feminisms, carceral studies and Black environmentalism.  In 2020, she completed her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania where she focused on Philly Black freedom movements through the lenses of oral history, digital storytelling, and material culture.