Faculty Spotlight
Faculty Spotlight was created by Caroline Parrish (WFU ’24), Intern for the Humanities Institute, 2022-2024. This series of interviews features Wake Forest faculty who engage with the humanities! Each month, the WFU Humanities Institute Newsletter will contain a brief snippet of an interview with a different faculty member with a link to the HI website to read the writeup in full.
The mission of this project is to engage more of our campus community with the humanities, as well as increase visibility of faculty projects. We want professors to know what everyone else is working on!
2023-2024 Interviews
Dr. Brittany Battle
Interview by Caroline Parrish (WFU ’24)
“How do we make sure that the classroom is a site of care and community? How do we practice radical love and inclusion?”
This is a question that Dr. Brittany Battle grapples with every day in her teaching at Wake Forest. In fact, compassion is an integral component of all of her outreach; care is a fundamental part of abolition work, which she says is a facet often left omitted from the discussion.
Dr. Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Wake Forest Sociology Department and Affiliate Faculty of the African American Studies Program. She is also one of the founders of the Triad Abolition Project, a grassroots organization that works to address the issues of the carceral state and provide adequate resources to those impacted by it. These two facets of Dr. Battle’s work do not exist in a vacuum, however. She is constantly bridging the gap between Wake Forest and the broader community.
“I strongly believe in community-engaged research. We hire researchers from the community that have experiences that we’re studying. [I believe in] research from the margins.” Dr. Battle realizes that the Winston-Salem community is sometimes hesitant to trust researchers from Wake Forest, and she is committed to involving people outside of campus in her restorative work as much as possible. Her mission doesn’t stop there, though. She’s as strongly committed to the culture she fosters inside the classroom as out of it.
“I’m deeply informed by bell hooks and her understanding of the classroom as a site of transgression and the ways we can bring in really strong analyses of power and marginalization and oppression into the things that we teach.” The traditions of Black feminism have empowered and inspired Dr. Battle to be transformational: in her classroom, in her scholarship, and in her activism. She’s looking forward, considering how her efforts will impact the next generations: “I really want students to understand the possibilities for what they can do in the future. That is super important, beautiful, and my favorite part of my job – to collaborate with students as they do this kind of work.”
Dr. Battle’s work is deeply rooted in compassion in an effort to make Wake Forest, Winston-Salem, and the world at large a more just place. She tasks her students with finding what lights their fire, what burns them up inside. It is that fire, she says, that will drive the kinds of thinking that make change.
For more information on Dr. Battle’s work, check out the Triad Abolition Project’s website here, and her university bio page here.