Three years ago, Jessica Lee Stovall (’07) returned to the school where she earned her undergraduate degree and created something remarkable.
As an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies, she launched The SoulFolk Collective, a group of undergraduate and graduate students whose mission is to use qualitative research to preserve/archive Black stories while generating insights that can help build the conditions for Black communities to thrive.
Now, Stovall is the latest recipient of a faculty fellowship established in 2021 by political science and international relations alumnus Rob Buono (’86), a longtime member of the College of Letters & Science’s Board of Visitors, and his wife and English alumna Liz Cicchelli (’91). The fund is designed to support faculty members in academic departments across L&S whose research includes a social justice angle.
"In establishing the Collective, Professor Stovall’s dynamic and energizing vision has created an important opportunity for students to combine scholarship, research and community,” says Buono. “We are excited to be supporting her and the Collective.”
Stovall credits her department chair, Christy Clark-Pujara, for advocating on her behalf.
“I have really big dreams and ideas that I want to accomplish, and when I came to UW–Madison as a very eager, earnest young professor, I knew I wanted to have a qualitative methods lab that would focus on Black life in Madison,” Stovall says. “But I very naively didn’t understand how much money it takes to be able to support students in a lab.”
The support comes at an opportune time as Stovall and The Soulfolk Collective are launching the SoulFolk Saturday School, a Saturday Freedom School for Black high school students, early next year. The school will be housed at The Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison, another key supporter of The SoulFolk Collective.
Like the Black Madison Archive, the Freedom School is a labor-intensive project. Not only do members of the Collective have to create curriculum, but they also need to look through and analyze the hours of storytelling and experience to gauge the project’s true impact. The fellowship’s funding will also support sending students in the Collective and Freedom School students to major research conferences — and provide access to the knowledge they create from that experience.
“Our Collective’s commitment is that the research we do is publicly accessible, so we’re not falling into the trap of writing these pieces about Black experience that the people we’re writing with can’t even access because of a paywall,” Stovall says. “The money will help fund our articles to be open access or be public facing.”
Since the Collective’s inception, a few of Stovall’s original set of students have graduated with master’s degrees or have entered the academic job market. Six current students are invested in the Freedom School Project, and, as she teaches her course on Black Qualitative Methods this fall, Stovall is creating a pipeline to potentially populate the Collective into the future. With backing from Buono and Cicchelli’s fellowship fund, that future is looking especially bright.
“Whenever I’ve had an idea that takes a lot of community support and tangible concrete resources, the College has really stepped up to figure out how to make that happen,” says Stovall. “I am really grateful for that. It’s allowed for the creation of a qualitative research lab that is doing work that is making a difference.”