Sherita L. Johnson

Professional Bio

Sherita L. Johnson is the Director of the College of Liberal Arts’ Africana Research Center (ARC) and an Associate Professor of English. In collaboration with Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR), Prof. Johnson is a 2024-2025 Just Transformations Commonwealth Faculty Fellow as funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

With a concentration on nineteenth-century African American literature and print culture, her work is grounded by archival research that illuminates extraordinary experiences of Black writers, activists, and public intellectuals. In 2024, Prof. Johnson was elected to the membership of the American Antiquarian Society. From 2022-2024, she served as the President of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She is the author of Black Women in New South Literature and Culture, with contributions to African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880 and Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South. Examining the life and writings of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, tracking Frederick Douglass in the colored conventions movement, and investigating African American experiences during Reconstruction are current projects that inform her teaching to broaden critical perspectives of race, U.S. regionalism, and Black organizing in nineteenth century studies.

Public Scholarship

Integral to Prof. Johnson’s career as an interdisciplinary scholar is public-facing work. She has created community partnerships in the Sixth Street Museum District, which includes “a collection of museums and historical buildings located in the Mobile/Bouie Neighborhood” in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. This neighborhood was “once Hattiesburg’s historic African American cultural hub of entrepreneurship, professional life, commerce, social activity and the place of civil-rights activism.” In collaboration with the African American Military History Museum (AAMHM), Prof. Johnson has developed programming to commemorate Freedom Summer 1964 activism in the civil rights movement and African American Women in the suffrage movement; used the AAMHM as a community classroom for college students to learn about Black veterans and to preserve their oral histories; and has hosted numerous public lectures. In May 2024, Prof. Johnson received the Distinguished Service Award from the African American Military History Museum to acknowledge her commitment to supporting its mission.

Additionally, Prof. Johnson served as a committee member consulting the Hattiesburg Convention Commission to create a public monument, “Generations Strong: Inspiring African Americans in Hattiesburg Commemorative Wall.” It highlights their exceptional achievements and contributions to the community as business owners, teachers, activists, artists, and religious leaders, among other roles.

Prof. Johnson remains committed to preserving and promoting the history of the Bay Springs School located in the Kelly Settlement just outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Built in 1925, the Bay Springs School is one of the few remaining rural Rosenwald Schools in Mississippi designed for the purpose of educating African Americans during segregation. Prof. Johnson has been working with service-learning students, Bay Springs School alumni, and the caretakers of the historic site to catalogue, archive, and contextualize the school’s artifacts with the goal of developing programs for community engagement. In 2023-2024, Prof. Johnson was awarded the Conville Endowment Award for Community Engagement and Service Learning from the University of Southern Mississippi to support the Bay Springs School Project, an initiative for maintaining the school as a cultural heritage site open to educational programming.

Working with the Freedom50 Research Group, a collaborative she formed in 2015, Prof. Johnson has focused on the life of Clyde Kennard. In the 1950s, Kennard was the first African American to attempt to enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now University of Southern Mississippi) which led to tragic outcomes. The collaborative has given public lectures, produced a short documentary film (Measure of Progress: The Clyde Kennard Story), and, currently, are completing an edited volume about Clyde Kennard’s legacy in higher education.