Alisea Williams McLeod is former Chair of Humanities at Rust College (Mississippi, USA). Her most recent scholarship has been on African American Emancipation. As a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium, she has worked with a team of digital humanists to compile names of black soldiers and their families.

McLeod has been awarded a number of fellowships including a Gilder Lehrman Summer Faculty Fellowship and an American Documentary Editors Summer Fellowship. With University of Georgia professor Scott Nesbit and University of Chicago Harper-Schmidt Fellow 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.

McLeod was named Senior Associate Researcher at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. During the 2020-2021 school year, she was in residence there to further her work digitizing contraband (war refugee) camp records, public scholarship that promises to reacquaint thousands of Americans with their ancestral pasts. McLeod’s public-facing work can be found at www.lastroadtofreedom.org.

For more details, please visit her profile page at the Institute for the Formation of Knowledge.