Krystal Frazier

Teaching Fields

AFrican American History to 1900
African American History Since 1900
Civil Rights History

Contact

202G Woodburn Hall
P.O. Box 6303
Morgantown, WV 26506-6303
Phone: (304) 293-2421 ext. 5244
Fax: (304) 293-3616
krystal.frazier@mail.wvu.edu

• Degrees

  Ph. D. Rutgers University, 2009
  United States and African American History
  M.A. American University, 2001
  United States and African American History, Oral History Certification
  B.S. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, 1999
  History Education, Summa Cum Laude

• Research Interests

  My broad research interests are in the social and cultural history of African American communities and its economic and political implications. My dissertation research argued that distinctive patterns of forming and maintaining kinship ties among black families shaped the ways in which African Americans organized themselves throughout the twentieth century. Scholars recognize that wide family systems were important to surviving slavery, but have paid little attention to the role of extra-nuclear family groups beyond the antebellum period. My project identified African Americans’ extended and adoptive kin networks as important resources for combating racism, poverty, and familial dispersion from emancipation to the turn of the twenty-first century.

  In addition to research on African American kin networks, I am also interested in recent shifts in the racial and national identity of traditional African Americans, whom I identify as the descendants of the Atlantic Slave Trade to the part of North America that became the United States. I want to investigate African American identity shifts in relation to accelerating populations of black African, Caribbean, and South American immigrants, increasing numbers of African American people who have children with non-black partners, and rising sentiments of patriotism in light of perceived national security threats. My research will also historicize the increasingly popular identification of “multi-racial” among people who would have historically identified as “black” and the implications of such identifications in post-Obama America. Such an exploration will address the overarching meanings of race and racial construction and the probable extinction of traditional racial categories in the United States.

• Grad Students Advised

• Courses Offered

• Publications

  Editorial Assistant, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Volume IV: When Clowns Make Laws for Queens, 1880-1887, ed. Ann D. Gordon. Rutgers University Press, 2006