Thomas Blakeslee

Thomas Blakeslee is the Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department. He is an intellectual and social historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, with a focus on African American social histories, gender, and resistance. His current project traces the history of Black fatherhood in the United States from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century. He examines how African American fathers were positioned within national debates on race, gender, and citizenship, and how those debates shaped and were shaped by ideas of family, masculinity, and social order. His work explores competing portrayals of Black fatherhood by White supremacists, formerly enslaved men and their families, and Black intellectuals engaged in abolitionist and civil rights activism.

Blakeslee earned his doctorate in history at Harvard University, where he served as a Pedagogy Fellow at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, as well as a Teaching Fellow and researcher. He received his BA in history from the University of California, Berkeley.