LaShawnDa Pittman is an Associate Professor in the American Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before coming to the UW, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. In 2011, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

Dr. Pittman is currently focused on three distinct, but interrelated aspects of grandparent caregiving. She was recently awarded a Simpson Center Society of Scholars Fellowship, Royalty Research Fund, and a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship to complete her book, Grandmothering While Black (UC, 2023)

As a Digital Humanities Summer Fellow, Pittman will work on The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library, a collaborative, community-based model for gathering, archiving, and digitizing our “libraries” (Black grandmothers’ stories and cultural inheritances, e.g., material possessions, cultural traditions, rituals, language, etc.) across multiple, preservable websites that will be strategically and complementarily linked. This publicly accessible digital resource allows Black grandmothers to contribute to and control the stories we tell about their lives. It aims to repair what we are taught about understudied and misrepresented populations (e.g., Black grandmothers, the Gullah Geechee community) and to reclaim their narratives and culture using firsthand accounts.