UMass Amherst’s Whitney Battle-Baptiste Named 2025 Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lecturer

Whitney Battle-Baptiste, professor of anthropology and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center, has been selected to be the Archaeological Institute of America’s (AIA) Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lecturer for 2025. One of the highest honors that the AIA can bestow, the lectureship recognizes distinguished work and scholarship in the field of archaeology in the U.S. or internationally.

Battle-Baptiste’s research focuses on the connections of race, gender, class and sexuality during slavery and post-emancipation. Her work has included interpreting captive African domestic spaces at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation in Nashville, Tennessee; school segregation in 19th century Boston; the Millars Plantation site in the Bahamas; and the Burghardt family homestead, also known as the W.E.B Du Bois Boyhood Homesite, in Great Barrington.

Battle-Baptiste’s Norton lectures will reflect on her pioneering work first published in 2011, Black Feminist Archaeology (Routledge), which outlines Black feminist thought and research for archaeologists and illustrates how it can be used to improve contemporary historical archaeology. Battle-Baptiste will present the lectures to local AIA societies in Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina.

The lectureship honors the memory of Charles Eliot Norton, professor of the history of art at Harvard University, and co-founder and first president of the AIA. Norton Lecturers are chosen by the AIA’s Lecture Program Committee annually.