Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham is an alumnus of Spelman College, and the program director and associate professor of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies (MWGS) at Texas Woman’s University (TWU). The history of Quakertown is especially important to her as someone who teaches and writes about African American women’s history during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She is also working closely with TWU students on archival projects to preserve African American history.

Danielle won the 2020 National Women’s Studies Association’s Sara A. Whaley Book Prize for Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers (Rutgers University Press, 2020). As a fellow of the OpEd Project’s Public Voices of the South, Phillips-Cunningham is writing about the connections between African American women’s labor organizing history and the recent elections in the United States. Her article “The Long History of Black Women Organizing Might Decide Senate Control” appeared in The Washington Post.

She is also working on a book-length study about the early twentieth century labor organizing history of African American educator Nannie Helen Burroughs’ National Trade School for Women and Girls in Washington D.C. The project is supported by an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant and a TWU Creative Arts and Humanities Grant. She recently published a co-authored article about Burroughs with TWU student Veronica Popp. They also have a forthcoming article that will appear in the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color.