Marc Ridgell is a first-year PhD student in Africana Studies and William Fontaine Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Their prospective dissertation uses critical ethnography and GIS mapping to examine how Black queer and trans people experience community amid active gentrification, policing, and larger neoliberal affects in Philadelphia. Their summer Price Lab project envisions a public-facing website that exhibits archives, oral histories, and maps of Black LGBTQ+ life and organizing in Philadelphia. 

 

They graduated magna cum laude with their B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2023. While at WashU, they completed a senior thesis through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute, and Leadership Alliance at the University of Chicago.