Dr. Kelly Schmidt completed a joint PhD in Public History and U.S. History at Loyola University Chicago in 2021. From 2016 to 2021, she worked with Saint Louis University and the Jesuits of Canada and the United States as Research Coordinator for their joint Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project.
Dr. Kelly Schmidt has joined WashU & Slavery as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Schmidt completed a joint PhD in Public History and U.S. History at Loyola University Chicago in 2021. She is a public historian and digital humanist who specializes in African American history with a focus on slavery, racism, abolition, and resistance. She brings extensive knowledge and experience related to understanding and addressing the history of enslavement in St. Louis and the wider Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, including how it relates to higher education institutions. In 2016, she began studying the ways higher education institutions were addressing their connections to histories and legacies of slavery. From 2016 to 2021, while completing her dissertation research on people enslaved to the Jesuits in the central and southern United States, Kelly worked with Saint Louis University and the Jesuits of Canada and the United States as Research Coordinator for their joint Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project (SHMR).
In that role and other capacities, including years volunteering and working at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Dr. Schmidt has developed an extensive record of public history work—in research and interpretation; museum education and exhibition development; digital media; archival collections and conservation; development of walking tours; and work with high school and college educators and students. Kelly will not only greatly enrich the research insights and project scope of the WashU & Slavery Project, but will also help advance our efforts to position WashU as a key partner in this important work of commemoration and reckoning in our region, through collaboration with academic and other institutional and community partners.
Dr. Schmidt’s appointments are formally in CRE2 and the Department of African and African-American Studies, but she will engage with various academic units and work closely with the libraries and museum, through project-related research, teaching, and creative work. Her time will be split between work on the WashU & Slavery Project and continued development of her scholarship on enslaved communities in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, the focus of a book project tentatively titled “Their Earnest Desire to be Free”: Enslaved People, Jesuit Masters, and Negotiations for Freedom on American Borderlands, 1823-1930.
