Tiyi Morris 

Dr. Tiyi M. Morris is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University at Newark and director of the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP). She received her B.A. in African & African American Studies and Liberal Studies from Emory University, and a Master’s and Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University. She is a Civil Rights historian who studies Black women’s social and political activism. Dr. Morris’ interdisciplinary research and teaching combines the fields of African American and African Studies; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and American History. With this focus, she has taught courses such as 20th century US History; Gender, Sex and Power; Black Feminist Thought; The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements; and Social (In)Justice and the Black Experience. 

 Dr. Morris is the author of Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (UGA Press, 2015). Her work has also appeared in Southern Black Women in the Civil Rights Era (1954-1974): A State By State Study (Texas A&M Press, 2013), Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (IU Press, 2007), and Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Struggles in America (NYU Press, 2005). 

 Teaching in African American and African Studies, a discipline that emerged from social justice movements, her curricula underscore the need to create a more just and equitable society. Dr. Morris believes her role as an educator is to help dismantle systems of oppression by liberating the minds of students and empowering them to challenge the oppressions they face and/or perpetuate. She began teaching prison-based classes in 2019 to support the discipline’s mission to connect the community to the campus and actualize a philosophy of education as the practice of freedom. She views her teaching in correctional institutions as a way to connect theory and practice and to engage in the community work that makes our intellectual endeavors relevant to the larger Black community and society as a whole.