Penn State Penn State: College of the Liberal Arts

Center forBlack Digital Research, #DigBlk

Shirley Moody-Turner

Shirley Moody-Turner

CBDR Co-Director
Founder, Black Women's Organizing Archive
Pronouns: She/Her
Biography:
Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner is associate professor and award-winning teacher of English and African American Studies, and affiliate faculty with University Libraries. She is co-director, with P. Gabrielle Foreman, of the Center for Black Digital Research where she works with teams of faculty, staff, librarians, post-doctoral fellows, student leaders, and community members to bring to digital life the lost, overlooked, and buried histories of Black organizing. She is the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project, a cross-institutional partnership that worked with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center to digitize the Anna Julia Cooper Papers and with Douglass Day 2020 to produce a community-based, crowd-sourced transcription of the collection. In 2016 she founded the Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program to support historically underrepresented students in pursuing graduate studies in English and African American Studies. Her current work focuses on recuperating often-hidden forms of Black women’s intellectual, literary, and political activism. She is author and editor of several published and forthcoming books and is currently working on a Penguin Portable edition of Anna Julia Cooper’s writings and an interpretive biography reframing Cooper's "courageous revolts” against Jim (and Jane) Crow educational practices.