Tanisha Ford’s scholarship offers the first study of its kind to trace the transnational evolution of what she terms “soul style” — an African-inspired mode of dress and hairstyling — as it emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.
Even though her work is rooted in the past, Tanisha Ford takes a thoroughly modern approach to it. Trained in 20th century U.S. and Black women’s history, the University of Massachusetts Amherst assistant professor is strictly 21st century in her approach to writing and teaching about the lives of Black women in the U.S., Britain and the African diaspora.
Ford’s scholarship offers the first study of its kind to trace the transnational evolution of what she terms “soul style” — an African-inspired mode of dress and hairstyling — as it emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.
Described by her Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies chair as an “up-and-coming star in African-American women’s history,” Ford’s personal style is far removed from that of dowdy-looking bookworm. She is feminist, fashionable and fly, as she describes herself. On a Facebook update earlier this year, Ford posted a photo of herself “rockin,” as she put it, a new makeup shade on the first day of class. “Do not be alarmed,” she told her students, “I am a young, fly, black woman … and I AM your professor!” The Facebook post included the hashtag #feministfierce.
Ford is simultaneously an academic historian who is active in public history projects and a social media whiz. She’s a contributing editor to the blog The Feminist Wire, posts widely on Facebook and Twitter, and also blogs on her own website Haute Couture Intellectualism, or her “virtual atelier,” offering views on “fashion and body politics, race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary culture.”
Her approach to history is to mine source documents in fresh and revealing ways. She reached beyond the mainstream narrative about the civil rights movement, which, she says, is typically “about the fight to integrate lunch counters, bus stations, gaining greater access to public institutions as a way to push back against Jim Crow segregations.”
