B.A., King’s College London, American Studies with Year Abroad at University of California, Berkeley, 2005
M.A., King’s College London, Contemporary Cinema Cultures, 2006
Dr Althea Legal-Miller - Post-Doctoral Researcher, King’s Cultural Institute
Biography
Althea Legal-Miller received her BA in American Studies with Year Abroad (University of California, Berkeley), MA in Contemporary Cinema Cultures and PhD in American Studies all from King’s College London. She has received a number of prestigious scholarships and awards, including an AHRC British Research Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the Mae C. King
Distinguished Paper Award on Women, Gender and Black Politics from the Association for the Study of Black Women in Politics (ASBWP). She is currently a Teaching Fellow in African American Civil Rights at UCL, Institute of the Americas.
Research Interests
Her doctoral dissertation "The unmentionable ugliness of the jailhouse": Sexualized Violence, the Black Freedom Movement and the Leesburg Stockade Imprisonment, 1963 explored the history and visual culture memory of ritualised jail-based sexual violence against female civil rights activists at the hands of white male southern law-enforcers.
Additional academic interests lie chiefly within the area of contemporary African American cinema cultures.
A writer as well as an academic, Dr Legal-Miller’s cultural critiques have appeared in a variety of publications, which include Journal of Women’s History, Clutch Magazine, XO Jane, The Root, and The Grio.
Teaching Experience
BA instructor for Visual Culture: American Girls on Film, Department of American Studies, King’s College London, 2009.
Projects
Collaborated on Post-Katrina Voices, Writing and Research Project, New Orleans, LA., organised by the University of California, Berkeley, Department of African American Studies, 2006.
Presentations
“The Unmentionable Ugliness of the Jailhouse’: Black Girl Protesters, Sexualized Violence, and the Leesburg Stockade Imprisonment of 1963.” 44th Annual Meeting of the Oral History Association (OHA), October 27-31, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia.
“Dorothy Height and Women’s Civil Rights Mobilization against Jailhouse Abuses.” 41st Annual Meeting of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), March 18-21, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia.
“You Just Can’t Imagine What They Did To Her’: Black Girl Activists and Jailhouse Sexualized Violence.” Staff-Student Research Seminar, March 04, 2009, King’s College London.
“Black Girls and the Civil Rights Movement.” National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), March 28, 2008, Washington D.C.
“The Stockade: A Visual Culture Analysis.” John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, August 20, 2007, Washington D.C.