DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Biography

Marquis Taylor is a fifth-year history Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University. His work lies at the intersection of studies on race and adolescence, Black youth activism, and the 20th-century U.S. state. To date, Marquis’ research and dissertation project have received funding from the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Research, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Center, and the Graduate School at Northwestern.

Marquis is committed to producing public-facing work and engaging broad audiences with his scholarship. He has worked on several D.H. and museum exhibitions as a graduate student. In 2022, his data set Contested Freedom: Free Persons of Color in Savannah, GA 1823-1842, was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation. He later collaborated with a team of historians and digital humanists to develop an online exhibition highlighting Black activism in antebellum Illinois. The online exhibition titled “Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice” is available on the Colored Conventions Project website. In 2022, Marquis curated an exhibition, Freedom for Everyone, on slavery and abolition in the United States to recognize Northwestern’s first observance of Juneteenth.

During the 2023-24 school year, Marquis was awarded a Mellon Public History Predoctoral Fellowship, where he worked for the Tenement Museum in New York City. He served as Lead Researcher for the Museum’s latest permanent exhibit, Union of Hope: 1869, which centers on the experiences of Black people living in Civil War-era New York. His work in this role has been featured by CBS Saturday Morning, the Nieman Lab at Harvard University, the New York Times, and Essence magazine, among others.