UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Sherita L. Johnson spent more than a decade advancing scholarship and cultivating enduring community connections through her role as director of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Black Studies.

Those experiences, Johnson said she believes, will serve her well in her new role as director of the Africana Research Center (ARC) in Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts.

Since starting in the position, Johnson, an associate professor of English, has committed herself to expanding the reach of ARC, which is dedicated to advancing scholarship on the history, life and culture of the African diaspora — the worldwide community of people of African descent.

Among other duties, Johnson will coordinate the center’s two primary events: the Nelson Mandela Lecture Series in the fall and the Barbara Jordan Lecture Series in the spring. She’ll also collaborate closely with the center’s post-docs on research initiatives, and she has plans to forge interdisciplinary partnerships with other centers, institutes and departments, both within the college and across the University.

“Everything about the center seems to line up with my interests as a scholar,” Johnson said. “I’m now in the process of learning more about what ARC has stood for in the past to fulfill its mission going forward. At this point, I plan to concentrate on ways of making ARC more visible by placing more emphasis on our research initiatives, and also looking back on the past to see how we’ve supported post-docs and where they have gone in their careers. The challenge is finding those connections and making that network more visible.”

Johnson is also committed to making more inroads with the local community, having learned that Bellefonte has a rich African American history that extends back to the Civil War era, when it played a prominent role on the Underground Railroad.

Johnson was highly engaged in public-facing work during her time at Southern Mississippi. In 2015, she formed the Freedom50 Research Group, a collaborative focused on the life of Clyde Kennard, the first African American to attempt to enroll at the university when it was still the segregated Mississippi Southern College. The group’s initiatives include the annual Clyde Kennard Lecture, the short documentary, “Measure of Progress: The Clyde Kennard Story,” and a soon-to-be-completed edited volume on Kennard’s legacy in higher education.

In addition, Johnson created community partnerships in Hattiesburg’s Sixth Street Museum District and developed programming to commemorate the Freedom Summer 1964 activism during the Civil Rights Movement and African American women’s roles in the suffrage movement. She also served as a committee member consulting the Hattiesburg Convention Commission on creating a public monument celebrating prominent African Americans from the city.

Committed to preserving and promoting the history of the Bay Springs School, one of the few remaining Rosenwald Schools designed to educate African Americans in rural Mississippi during segregation, Johnson worked with service-learning students, Bay Springs School alumni and the site’s caretakers to catalogue, archive and contextualize the school’s artifacts for community engagement programming. And she received Southern Mississippi’s 2023-24 Conville Endowment Award for Community Engagement and Service Learning in recognition of her work on behalf of the project.

“Outreach to the broader community is one of the things I’m most proud of from my previous job,” Johnson said. “Central Pennsylvania is certainly different from Mississippi, but there’s a rich, rich history here that’s worth promoting.”

A specialist in 19th century African American literature and print culture, Johnson is the author of the book, “Black Women in New South Literature and Culture,” published by Routledge in 2010; and a contributor to “African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880," published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, and “Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South,” published by LSU Press this year.

Johnson’s research seeks to shine a light on unsung writers of that era, among them Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who in addition to being one of the first African American women to have her work published was a prominent abolitionist and suffragist who traveled in the same circles as Frederick Douglass.

“One of the first classes I took in graduate school was a 19th century African American literature course, and it changed my life,” Johnson said. “Taking that class is where I met Frances Harper and a whole generation of writers beyond those credited for the slave narratives. At the time, not a lot of people were thinking of 19th century African American writers. It wasn’t as valued — but it fascinated me.”

In observance of the bicentennial of Harper’s birth next year, Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR) will host a symposium led by Johnson, who is serving as a 2024-25 Just Transformations Commonwealth Faculty Fellow in collaboration with the CBDR.

Johnson first started collaborating with CBDR about a year ago through its Colored Conventions Project.

"[That work] excited me about the possibility of working at Penn State,” said Johnson, a member of the American Antiquarian Society and the former president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. “As a public humanities scholar, I enjoy the fact that I can take what I do in the institution to the public and talk to them in layman’s terms about the important work we do. ... Learning as much as I have over the last six months, I really feel Penn State is the right place for me at this stage of my career.”