Biography:
Teona Williams is a Black feminist historian and Assistant Professor of Geography, and co-director of the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers University. A daughter of the Black South, her work is shaped by intimate histories of land, loss, and survival across rural and urban landscapes. Her family’s roots trace to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where her great-grandparents purchased the former cotton plantation on which their ancestors had been enslaved—an act of Black worldmaking forged in the afterlives of slavery. That land, however, did not remain secure. When rural gentrification reared its familiar violence, her family was forced to permanently relocate to Washington, D.C., marking the first of two displacements that would profoundly shape her intellectual and political commitments. At twelve, she experienced displacement again, as her neighborhood along what was formerly known as Rhode Island Avenue became one of the early sites of urban gentrification in the city. She comes to this work as a Black feminist historian nurtured by rural and urban Black women cultural workers—women who understood that there was life after death, and who modeled how survival, care, and refusal might be practiced in the ruins of racial capitalism. Her research explores disaster and hunger as central forces shaping Black feminist ecologies in the twentieth century. Drawing from Black geographies, African American and environmental history, and Black feminist theory, she examines how catastrophe has been lived, contested, and reimagined by Black communities from the 1930s through the 1990s. Her current work follows a cadre of rural Black feminists who articulated expansive visions of food sovereignty, overhauled antiblack disaster relief regimes, and fought relentlessly for universal basic income, radical land reform, and food and clean water as fundamental human rights. Across her scholarship, Williams is concerned with how Black women have theorized and practiced worldmaking at what often feels like the end of the world.
Recent Publications:
- Williams, T. (2021). For “Peace, Quiet, and Respect”: Race, Policing, and Land Grabbing on Chicago’s South Side. Antipode, 53(2), 497–523.
- Williams, T. (Lead Author), Keeve, C., Watkins, C., Williams, B., Van Sant, L., Moulton, A. A., & Carney, J. A. (2025). Black Livingness and Insurgent Ecological Politics: Thinking Across Black Geographies/Atlantics/Ecologies. Dialogues in Human Geography.
- Williams, T. (2025). To Archive It Like It Is: Alice Walker’s Autobiography Project and the Preservation of Black Women’s History in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, 1968–1970. Journal of Historical Geography, 90.
- Williams, T. (2025). Islands of Freedom. In Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History. (Edited Volume/Book Chapter).
- Williams, T. (2020). The Links between Policing and Environmental Justice. Black Perspectives (African American Intellectual History Society).
- Williams, T., Gonzalez-Cedeño, K., Couvertier Garay, A., & Prince, L. (2025, January 9). A daughter’s love note: Decolonial love across the Greater Caribbean. Black Women Radicals. https://www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/a-daughters-love-note. Click or tap if you trust this link.https://www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/a-daughters-love-note
- Williams, T. (2016). Keyword on Black Ecologies. In International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Society.
Sites:
- Link to Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EaSY4oMAAAAJ&hl=en.
- Click or tap if you trust this link.https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EaSY4oMAAAAJ&hl=en
- Link Black Ecologies Lab: https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/Black_Ecologies