- Bio:
Kiamsha Bynes is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University. Her research broadly examines the complex history of Black female athletes and sportswomen who helped shape Black women’s sporting culture across the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Her work moves beyond a focus on their athletic achievements by examining the social, economic, and political forces that shaped their experiences. Her dissertation, Claiming Space: Black Women, Sport, and the Struggle for Athletic Belonging in the Twentieth Century explores how Black women incorporated and introduced women’s sports at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), challenged institutions to recognize them as athletes, defined their own notions of Black athletic womanhood, and asserted themselves as political agents.
As a Postdoctoral Fellow at RCHA, Bynes’s research project contributes to the center’s theme, “Black Power and White Supremacy: The Cyclical Dialectics of Power” by focusing on how anti-Blackness continued to shape Black women’s development and participation in sport throughout the late twentieth and early twenty first century. While Title IX expanded access for women, Black women faced intersecting barriers that revealed sport as a space where white supremacy adapted rather than retreated. Black women—as athletes and coaches—entered predominantly white athletic spaces in unprecedented numbers, disrupting the racial and gendered hierarchies of sport. The goal of her work is to position these experiences within broader Black liberation struggles, interrogating how Black sportswomen’s visibility challenged yet remained constrained by white power structures.
