Bridget Kelly
Bridget Laramie Kelly is a PhD Candidate of International Urban History. Her dissertation The Harlem Uprising of 1943: Black Self-Determination and the Formation of Probationary Citizenship develops a new framework for understanding what previous historians have considered a “riot,” and instead interprets the event as form of wartime mobilization in America’s largest Black city – a political uprising for “Black self-determination” at the height of World War II. 623 people were arrested in early August 1943, in one of New York’s largest mass arrests in state history. Her work foregrounds the governmental reaction to Harlem’s uprising and the creation of a new juridical and political category of degraded sub-citizenship, which Kelly calls “probationary citizenship.” New York deployed a secularized and truncated version of probation in an attempt to redirect Black Harlemites’ democratic nationalism – their demand for political self-determination towards the perceived needs and interests of the wartime state.
She is the author of “‘I Get So Mad Cause We Ain’t Got No Freedom’: Black Women, Rage, and the Harlem Uprising of 1943” published in the Journal of Urban History. She has another article coming out in the spring edition of the Journal of African American History titled, “The Materiality of Belonging: Black Property Claims after the Civil War.” She has also reviewed Stephen Robertson’s digital monograph, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 for the Journal of Social History.
She was named an Alternate for the AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship 2025-2026. Her work has been funded by Washington University in St. Louis, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Modern Language Association, University of Virginia, and George Mason University. In 2022, her article “They Cleaned Me Out Entirely: An Enslaved Woman’s Experience with General Sherman’s Army” won the Urban History Association’s Graduate Student prize. She has presented her work at multiple American History Association and Urban History conferences as well as the Modern Language Association convention as the MLA’s Public Humanities fellow.
Before accepting a graduate position as a Chancellor’s Fellow at Wash U, Bridget Laramie Kelly taught social studies in Austin, Texas and St. Louis, Missouri for seven years. Her broader intellectual interests include urbanization, citizenship, and American Indian studies. She recently developed and taught a sophomore seminar course titled: Turtle Island: Urbanization in Native America.