Alisea McLeod

Alisea McLeod is the Program Manager for Curriculum Innovation at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. An expert on African American Emancipation, McLeod completed a PhD in English and Education at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1998, and has taught at several colleges and universities including St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina; Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; and Indiana University South Bend. McLeod has been awarded a number of fellowships including a Gilder Lehrman Summer Faculty Fellowship and an American Documentary Editors Summer Fellowship and was a 2020—2021 Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium for Study of Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where she has worked with a team of digital humanists to compile names of black soldiers and their families. With University of Georgia professor Scott Nesbit and University of Sydney Lecturer in Political Economy John Clegg, McLeod successfully wrote for an NEH Advancement Grant—Freedom’s Movement: African American Space in War and Reconstruction—in 2018. She has been part of other grant projects including a 2019—2020 Humanities Grant for the Public Good funded by the Council of Independent Colleges and Mellon. You can read more about her work digitizing contraband (war refugee) camp records, public scholarship that promises to reacquaint thousands of Americans with their ancestral pasts, at www.lastroadtofreedom.org.