Biography

Kelsey Moore (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on southern African American History. She is also the Lead Chair of the Mardi Gras Indian Traditions: Going Global, Going Online under LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. She received a Dual BA in Africana Studies and Public Policy from New York University, where she graduated as the 2019 Valedictorian of the College of Arts and Science. Her current dissertation examines how the rural development plan of the Santee-Cooper Project disturbed interwoven ecological, spiritual, and epistemic traditions held by black South Carolinians. In addition to her dissertation, Moore created thefolk in 2020, a digital archive dedicated to highlighting black southern culture both past and present. As a proud South Carolinian, her digital praxis centers on preserving and rethinking The Black South as an essential landscape of black knowledges.  

Crossroads Research Fellow Project

“We Just Don’t Trust Our Memories to Stone”: Remapping Flooded Black Cemeteries

Between 1938 and 1942, the South Carolina Public Service Authority dug up or flooded some 9,000 graves under its Santee-Cooper land development project. Most of the graves belonged to enslaved Africans and their descendants. “Visualizing the Conjure South” is a digital project that seeks to remap 150 sunken cemeteries by conceptualizing and documenting a “Conjure value” among black South Carolinians.