Cheyenne Ross (She/Her)Ph.D. Student (2023 Cohort)

Cheyenne Ross (she/her) earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from St. John’s University and a Master of Arts in Higher Education and Student Affairs from New York University, where she served as an Acquisitions Editor for the Journal of Student Affairs. 

She is interested in considering what questions and approaches to education emerge when we consider the anti-black structuring of education in the afterlife of slavery. Through an engagement with novels, student protest archives, slave narratives, and using storytelling as method, Cheyenne asks: How do we attend to the liberatory possibility of education while also accounting for the ways anti-blackness has structured the education system? Thus, she brings together her background in literature, her professional training as a scholar of Higher Education and Student Affairs, and her academic training as a Black Studies scholar, to interrogate the ways black people have used narrative to refuse liberal notions of educational progress.

Cheyenne is also committed to public scholarship. She currently organizes a virtual learning space called Black Studies on the Block that meets monthly to discuss key texts, videos/films, and music related to Black Studies. 

She co-authored an article titled, “Institutional Narratives of Enslavement in Higher Education,” published in the Race and Social Problems journal. She is also a member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and a former McNair Scholar. 

She lives in Atlanta with her partner and her daughter, Ocean, who has grown with her as she has advanced through this PhD program, and whose black educational future is a key mobilizer of her work.