Kiana Knight

Biography

Dr. Kiana M. Knight is a historian of the modern African diaspora whose work explores how Black women across the Americas used language, education, and translation to build connections across national and linguistic borders. Her research examines how bilingual women in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean mobilized interlingual translation, self-help organizing, and respectability politics to shape Black internationalism and racial uplift during the twentieth century. At Notre Dame, Knight is revising her first book manuscript and expanding her research to consider women’s educational activism and the politics of bilingualism in mid-twentieth-century Costa Rica.

Knight earned her Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University, where her dissertation, Translating Racial Uplift: Black Women, Language, and Internationalist Politics, 1918–1965, traced the transnational activism of Black bilingual women whose educational and political labor helped define diasporic belonging in the modern world. Her scholarship brings together Black internationalist thought, transnational feminism, and modern Caribbean and Latin American history to reveal how language functioned as both a tool of empowerment and a site of negotiation for women of African descent. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Picturing Black History, Black Perspectives, and multiple edited collections, including The Cambridge History of Black Women in the United States.

A committed public scholar, Knight bridges academic and community audiences through digital and public humanities platforms, oral history projects, and collaborative forums on Black women’s global activism. Her research has been supported by the Brown University’s Pembroke Center, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.