Michelle Lanier, Lecturing Fellow of African & African American Studies

Please note: Michelle has left the "Documentary Studies Certificate" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

MICHELLE LANIER is a renowned public historian, folklorist, filmmaker, and multi-genre author, rooted in the Black South.

 A graduate of Spelman College and UNC-Chapel Hill, Michelle serves as the director of North Carolina's historic sites, a constellation of 27 museum spaces, historic structures, and landscapes including the final resting place of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, spaces of witness to human bondage such as the State Capitol, Stagville, and Somerset, and the birthplace of Harriet Ann Jacobs.

Michelle is a proudly unionized, adjunct fellow at the Department of African and African American Studies and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She has contributed to numerous documentary films including the acclaimed Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, which she executive produced. Mossville has been screened on five continents and has been featured by the United Nations in an effort to raise awareness around environmental racism.

Michelle has published in Southern Cultures, Oxford American, Bitter Southerner, and has authored a children's book recognized by the Library of Congress.

Through her current work as a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Department of Geography, Michelle is deepening her praxis of Black feminist and womanist cartographies through embodiment and the poetics of Black South commemoration, rooted to place .

A respected voice in the fields of public memory, Lanier has worked internationally to amplify the narratives of Black cultural expression and the material echoes of the U.S. South. As the conceptualist and director of The Harriet Jacobs Project, and through her larger work as a keeper of memory, Lanier bridges vernacular, artistic, and scholarly realms through the transformative power of place as witness.

Contact Info:

Office Location:
Office Phone:	(919) 684-2830
Email Address:

Teaching (Fall 2025):

• DOCST 110S.01, INTRODUCTION TO ORAL HISTORY Synopsis

  CDS 113, Th 06:30 PM-09:00 PM

  (also cross-listed as HISTORY 126S.01, WRITING 125S.01)

• AAAS 290S.06, SPECIAL TOPICS Synopsis

  CDS 001, Tu 06:30 PM-09:00 PM

Education:

M.F.A.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

2008