Work with thought leaders and academic experts from University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff

An asset-based researcher using innovation and best practices to transform #STEM education with a special focus on engineering and computing education. My years of industry and non-profit experience have allowed me to enter the world of academia and move the needle for some of our nation's grand challenges. My research group, the READi Lab, has hard-working and passionate undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, administrators, and collaborators from multiple institutions across varying disciplines.

Dr. Kami Fletcher started her educational career in the city where she was born and raised –Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She received her BA in English from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in 2001. She went on to receive two Master’s degrees - her MPA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2003 and her MA in Women’s Studies from Texas Woman’s University in 2006. And it is in the state of Maryland, where she now resides with her life mate, Dr. Myron Strong, and their three sons, that in 2013 Dr. Fletcherreceived her Ph.D. in History from Morgan State University. At present, Dr. Fletcher is an Associate Professor of American & African American History and Co-Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at Albright College. She teaches courses that explores the African experience in America and unpacks social and cultural U.S. history at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She is also the President of the Collective for Radical Death Studies, a non-profit organization whose mission it is to decolonize Death Studies and center BIPOC voices in death work. Her research centers on African American burial grounds, late 19 th /early 20 th century Black female and male undertakers, and contemporary Black grief and mourning. She is the co-editor of Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) and Grave History: Death, Race & Gender in Southern Cemeteries from Antebellum to the Post-Civil Rights Era (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming 2023). She has also authored articles and essays, which include the following: “Are Enslaved African Americans Buried at Mount Harmon Plantation? Space and Reflection for National Mourning and Memorializing” ; “Real Business: Maryland’s First Black Cemetery Journey’s into the Enterprise of Death, 1807-1920” ; “Long Live Chill #LLC: Exploring Grief, Memorial & Ritual in African American R.I.P. T-shirt Culture”. Currently, Dr. Fletcher is working on the “Culture Keeper’s” Oral History Project funded by theNational Science Foundation in collaboration with George Washington University. The project asks African American funeral service works, the nation's culture keepers, how rituals have been recreated, disrupted, reconceptualized, abandoned and sustained during the pandemic. For more on Dr. Fletcher visit her website: www.kamifletcher.com.