About

Heidi Dodson is a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  She works remotely (in Carrboro, NC) and is a researcher on the Oklahoma phase of the Black Homesteader Project, a multi-year collaboration between CGPS and the National Park Service.  She is a historian who specialized in late 19th and early 20th century African American history. Her research interests include community building, social movements, Black geographies and placemaking, race and landscape, public and digital history, and environmental history. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has an MLIS from the University of Texas at Austin. Heidi is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, titled “Following the River”: Black Migration and the Politics of Place in the Missouri Delta. Her work interrogates the intersections of rural migration, activism, and place in the Border South. Heidi most recently held positions as a Humanities in the World Postdoctoral Scholar at Penn State University (2019-2021), CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship at the University at Buffalo (2018-2019) and Oral History Scholar-in-Residence at the Marian Cheek Jackson Center in Chapel Hill, NC (2017-2018).