6th Annual Harriet Tubman Day Commemoration - Black Women's Studies Minor 20th Anniversary: Practicing Possibility
6th Annual Harriet Tubman Day Commemoration - Black Women's Studies Minor 20th Anniversary: Practicing Possibility
Department of African American and Africana Studies
Tuesday, March 10, 2026 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm Taliaferro Hall, 1126Practicing Possibility
In our current time, it is urgent that we not just dream/imagine a different future, but that we also cultivate a practice of collectivity, care, and critique that develops the muscle for world building.
This year the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department’s sixth observance of Harriet Tubman Day, organized in collaboration with the Department of African American and Africana Studies, is also a celebration of the 20th Anniversary of our joint degree program, the Black Women’s Studies Minor.
Joining us will be Dr. Aisha Finch and Ms. Ernestine Wyatt.
Dr. Aisha Finch is associate professor Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University. Professor Finch is a historian of the African Diaspora whose work develops Black feminist and decolonial approaches to the study of slavery, colonialism, and the Atlantic World. Her research centers Black practices of refusal, fugitivity, and care as forms of theory and world-making, with particular attention to enslaved and fugitive women in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S. South. Drawing on transnational Black feminist genealogies, she rereads colonial archives to illuminate how everyday people disrupted regimes of power and articulated alternative futures. Recent work explores Black feminist practices and reimaginings of care.
Dr. Finch is the author of Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841–1844, recipient of the Harriet Tubman Prize from the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, and coeditor of Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 18121912. Her current research brings together transnational Black feminist activism and the historical memory of marronage to ask what maroon histories open up for us as we confront ongoing violence, coloniality, and anti-Blackness in the present.
Ms. Ernestine ‘Tina’ Martin Wyatt, a great-great-great grandniece of Harriet Tubman, has joined us for each of our Harriet Tubman Day observances and we are delighted that she will be with us again this year. Ms. Wyatt is a UMD alum, having graduated with a Bachelors in Studio Art and Art History. She also earned a Master of Art in Museum Studies from George Washington University. Her artwork has been shown at the David C. Driskell Center and is in the collection of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. A retired nurse and educator, Ms. Wyatt has been instrumental in promoting the legacy of Harriet Tubman; she co-founded Harriet Tubman Day Washington District of Columbia and was instrumental in having Tubman’s military service recognized, including lobbying for recognition her work as a soldier in the Civil War, which eventually led to her induction into the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame.
In addition to our commemoration of the work Harriet Tubman, we will also celebrate twenty years of the Black Women’s Studies Minor, a joint degree program with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of African American and Africana Studies.