Lenora Renee Knowles

Lenora R. Knowles is a doctoral candidate in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, and a community organizer in East Baltimore. Employing black, latina and chicana feminist theories, archival research, and in-depth expert interviews her dissertation investigates the question, how does the cross-racial/cross-ethnic organizing of welfare rights and third world women organizers provide practical and conceptual models, for being human and being in community, that afford space to all? This dissertation project is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and relational exploration of the “coalitional relationalities” of black women and latina organizers who led the US welfare rights and US third world left movements from the 1960s through the early 1980s. Lenora's research has been supported by the University of Maryland Graduate School, the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund, and Smith College Special Collections.

She lives in Baltimore, MD where she is a co-founding member of Village of Love & Resistance (VOLAR), a black-led collective organizing poor and low-income black residents for community control and stewardship of land and housing in East Baltimore. She finds joy in designing and facilitating leadership development and political education processes that enable consciousness raising, promote collective knowledge production, and build grassroots power. She published an article titled, “How Do We Grow Grassroots Critiques of the State? A Close Reading of Triple Jeopardy from East Baltimore” in a special issue of WSQ.

Prior to joining the department, Lenora completed an MDiv at Union Theological Seminary where she served as a Fellow at the Poverty Initiative (now The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice) and was awarded the Anne M. Bennett & John C. Bennett Fellowship. As a first-generation college graduate Lenora attained an AB and was presented with the Ida B. Wells Award in Africana Studies at Brown University.