Sidney Rose McCall

Ph. D. Student (ABD)

advisor: Jody Allen
Email: [[srmccall01]]
Current Research: Environmental history of the American South, Black ecology, underground railroads, and abolition

Bio

Sidney Rose is a historian broadly concerned with the environmental histories and ecocultures of the American South. Pushing beyond the plantation systems through Black ecology, fugitivity, gender and sexuality studies, Diasporic plants, and their many waterways, her research maps the enslaved, free, fugitive, and emancipated Black folks whose environmental knowledge and geographies of resistance gave rise to free Black settlements and the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Sidney is a graduate of North Carolina Wesleyan College (B.A. in English, 2018) and Florida A&M University (M.A.S.S., 2020). Before returning to academia to grow her scholarship as a public historian, she worked as arts administrative assistance and tour-guide-turned-interpreter at the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community Inc. (PEC) in Historic Eatonville, the hometown of Zora Neale Hurston and the oldest incorporated Black town in the United States. Her co-authored children's book "Once Upon a Kwanzaa" (Hachette, 2025) inspired by the community-minded stories and afrofuturism of Zora, weaves the cultures and memories of the Black Diaspora through the seven principles of Kwanzaa, pushing the wintering holiday into an everyday practice rooted in cultural preservation, collective action, and communal history.