American Civilization

Sarah Seidman
Sarah Seidman is an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. She has a B.A. in American Studies from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University. Sarah’s interests revolve around the study of race, social movements, and visual culture in the transnational Americas. Her dissertation, "Venceremos Means We Shall Overcome: The African American Freedom Struggle and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1979," interrogates two decades of convergences between the African American liberation movement and the Cuban Revolution. In her dissertation she examines government documents, memoirs, posters, and a range of other materials in Cuba and the United States to explore the political and cultural relationships African American activists developed with the Cuban state and its citizens through travel, exile, and discourse. Her dissertation suggests that examining African American and Cuban convergences sheds light on the African American postwar freedom struggle, Cuba’s revolutionary project, and the possibilities and limitations of transnational solidarity.