Fierce Feminist Tanisha Ford Brings Style to Her Scholarship - Higher Education

Fierce Feminist Tanisha Ford Brings Style to Her Scholarship - Higher Education: 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.