Noaquia Callahan is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. She studied sociology and German at California State University of Long Beach and the University of Munich (B.A., 2008). Her research interests include African American and modern European history, women’s history, transnational feminist organizing, and race and empire.

Noaquia’s dissertation, "Divided Duty: African American Feminist Transnational Activism and the Lure of the Imperial Gaze, 1888-1922" investigates the ways race, gender, and citizenship intersected with empire and foreign policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It does so by exploring the career and networks of Mary Church Terrell, an African American feminist prominent on the international stage, as a window into the international activism of African American women.  The dissertation captures the moments in which black and white American and European internationalist feminists informed each other on issues concerning race, sexual violence, and woman suffrage. 

Selected Awards:

U.S. Fulbright Student Award (2016-17)

Samuel Flaggs Bemis Dissertation Research Grant, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (2016)

Marcus Bach Graduate Fellowship, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa ​(2016)

Doctoral Fellowship in African American History, German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. ​(2015-16)

Mellon-Moorland Travel to Collections Grantee, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington DC (2015-2016)

Jane A. Weiss Dissertation Scholarship, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, The University of Iowa (2015)

Ann Leger-Anderson Dissertation Fellowship, University of Iowa (2014-2015).

Graduate Fellow, Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy (2014).