Now a Ph.D. candidate, Tamika Richeson received a huge honor this spring: the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies, awarded to only 10 researchers per year. Photo: Jackson Smith
The passionate pragmatist
Tamika Richeson finds inspiration in the stories of women who came before her
Tamika Richeson chose to study history for a decidedly unromantic reason. From her vantage point as a struggling student in the Cleveland public school system, it looked like her only ticket into college.
“It was the only thing I didn’t do poorly at,” said the 28-year-old, now a Ph.D. student in UVA’s Corcoran Department of History.
Her parents—a career military dad whose great-grandmother was raised in slavery, a Korean immigrant mom who had grown up in poverty before starting her own business—never went to college. But her older sister did, and had planted the seed. A degree opened doors.
So she wheedled her way into honors history courses, worked hard, and ended up at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She fell in love with academia there, and what had started as a means to a good, safe job became a gateway to graduate studies at Columbia University. She worked three jobs to stay afloat in New York, got her master’s, and married her high school sweetheart, but she wasn’t done with scholarship. In 2010, she arrived at UVA.
Things didn’t unfold as she’d expected. She had always examined history through a personal lens on some level, she said, but at Jefferson’s University, it often felt like nobody was looking at things the way she did.
“I didn’t know what I was doing as a historian in my first year there, but I also knew you couldn’t understand the 19th century in Virginia without understanding the experience of enslaved and free black people,” she said.
In the midst of her academic angst came a new wrinkle: She got pregnant. It put things into focus, made her rethink priorities. Faith and family were at the top, but she knew she didn’t want to let go of her work. “I thought, ‘Are you going to do this academia thing? You’re kind of pissed off about how they do things here. Is this going to stop you? What are you going to do?’”
What she did was double down and turn her scholarly attention on African-American women in the mid-1800s. “It was sort of to prove a point,” she said: Yes, you can shed new light on our understanding of America by examining the lives of people history has largely ignored.
She chose to write her dissertation on black female criminality in the Civil War. She found a whole world of black women who hadn’t backed down, and in them, new narratives to help understand race and gender in a time of upheaval.
“There are women in my stories that have been beaten to death for attempting to resist their masters,” she said. “There are women who were young mothers who left their child at the doorstep of a more respectable person who they hoped would give that child a better life.”
The logistics of unearthing and telling those stories got tough. UVA doesn’t offer maternity leave for Ph.D. candidates, so when her daughter arrived, Richeson took a week off, then began Skyping into class. When she started back in earnest, she couldn’t find a convenient place to pump breast milk. She paid for an on-street parking space near Grounds and darted out to pump between classes.
“I didn’t have tinted windows, but at that point, I didn’t care,” she said. Eventually, she found she could strike a balance.
“I learned it’s not meant for us to have it all in a given moment,” said Richeson. “The people who seem to have it all just don’t waste any time.”
And she’s learned to take a longer view when it comes to academia in general.
“Everyone comes to the table with a life that’s influenced by their own world view,” she said. “I had to learn that lesson—that everyone who’s not interested in black women’s history is not a racist or a sexist.”
A major validation came this spring in the form of a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies, awarded to only 10 researchers each year. It’s a huge honor, she said, but it makes her a little nervous. She still has about a third of her dissertation left to go. But she no longer feels out of place.
“This girl who couldn’t pass the Ohio state proficiency test, who struggled through her classes, who still struggles through her Ph.D. classes—I found my niche,” she said. “I really began to love what I’m doing, instead of being afraid of it.”—G.B.