The Department of African American Studies is pleased to announce our newest addition to the faculty!  We welcome associate professor, Dr. Mary Phillips to the team to further our commitment to excellence in teaching and research.

In her work on women's history, Dr. Mary Frances Phillips focuses on wellness studies, mass incarceration, Black feminism, gender, and the modern Back freedom struggle. She studies social movements to deconstruct the interior lives of lesser-known black women. To do this, she collects oral histories through practices and analysis grounded in black feminist theories and then corroborates them with archival material from the past.  She investigates the daily realities of black women activists within social movements, concentrating on radicals who integrated care work and healing in their political activism.

As a historian, her research has advocated for the inclusion of the voices of African American women who have been marginalized in the scholarship on the Black Freedom Movement. Her book, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (2025, New York University Press, Black Power Series), deploys a feminist framework to center the intersecting identities of radical black women activists and the importance of their relationship with wellness.

Dr. Phillips received the following certifications: B.S. in Health Studies from Michigan State University; M.A. in African American and African Studies from Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in African American and African Studies from Michigan State University.