Magdalene Zier

Thesis Title: Staging the Wake: Black Women Playwrights and the Fight Against Lynching, 1916-1940

What Now: History PhD Candidate at Stanford University

I am very grateful to History & Literature for shaping where I am today. I loved the community that Hist & Lit tutorials fostered, the flexibility to take classes in a wide range of fields, and the opportunity to practice conducting archival research. It was in Professor Robin Bernstein’s African American Theater, Drama & Performance class that I first encountered the anti-lynching plays that would become the topic of my senior thesis. I was immersed in campus theater with the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, but I had not previously understood the long legacy of using the stage as a site for protest. Thanks to the support of my professors, especially Robin Bernstein, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Tim McCarthy, I began studying the importance of art in the early twentieth-century anti-lynching movement.  After graduation, I moved to Baltimore to work at the NAACP’s national headquarters. Two years out of college, I decided to return to school and pursue a JD and history PhD at Stanford. Although I had not previously heard of such a joint degree when I first began my grad school search, Hist & Lit inspired me to stick to an interdisciplinary path and to continue my studies of race, gender, and law in American history.