Profile

Professor Quin’Nita Cobbins-Modica is a scholar of African American history whose research centers on black women and politics in the American West. She completed her PhD in 2018 at the University of Washington and has spent the last two years as a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Gonzaga University. She is currently completing revisions on a book manuscript, Black Emeralds: African American Women’s Activism and Politics in Seattle, which explores the political engagement, resistance strategies, and community building efforts of black women across the twentieth-century. This activism went well beyond formal politics and the fight for women’s suffrage, extending into unions, businesses, social services, and community organizations. Cobbins-Modica is attentive to the diversity of approaches taken by African American women activists, who were sometimes at odds with one another even when fighting similar forms of oppression and exclusion. While illuminating African American history in the Pacific Northwest, Black Emeralds offers an expansive new interpretation of the relationship between women’s activism, the Civil Rights movement, and public service.

Cobbins-Modica teaches courses focused on Black history, African American women, Civil Rights, and the American West. Her creative pedagogy involves multiple forms of learning, including engaging students in digital humanities work. As the Executive Director and Webmaster of BlackPast.org, Prof. Cobbins-Modica has developed her own and others’ public-facing scholarship on the African American experience.