Casidy B. Campbell, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Campbell’s areas of specialization include black studies, black girlhood, digital studies, oral history, sexuality, pleasure, subjectivity and geography, social media (movements), and the history of technology. She is currently working on her book project tentatively titled “When Play Turns Lethal: Digital Mediation and Recuperating the (After)lives of Black Girls.” Dr. Campbell's work is focused on the fullness of black girls’ personhood and seeks to honor the life of unnamed, unknown, overlooked black girls in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who only come to have political significance in death. Using oral history and other methods, her project works to fill in archival gaps piecing together all possible forms of source material including compressed, or seemingly incomplete, digital traces in order to assemble their “emotional inner worlds,” as well as their ordinary, daily lives and technological agency which are flattened in service of broader political agendas. Her research reveals how 1) the dynamic between political organizing and digital technology reveal the structural constraints of technology as a justice seeking tool, and 2) how black girls use the same digital technologies that often efface them to assert their quotidian perspectives. She is a contributor to the recently published Global History of Black Girlhood edited by LaKisha Simmons and Corinne Fields, current member of the Digital Inequality Lab, and a former 2021 Community of Scholars Fellow at the Institute of Research on Women and Gender and DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism) Network Graduate Scholar. 

Sample Publications 

The Digital Inequality Lab. “The Lag Manifesto.” Afterimage 49, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 110–26. 

Casidy Campbell and LaKisha Michelle Simmons. (2022).“For Black Girls: Creating Your Own Black Girlhood Archive” in The Global History of Black Girlhood edited by Corinne Fields and LaKisha Simmons. University of Illinois Press.