Humanities Career Spotlight: Dr. Kenly Brown, Spencer Foundation

Hear from Dr. Kenly Brown about her experience as a program officer for a private foundation — an important role in the broader world of the humanities — and learn more about how her humanities degree and her time at WashU helped prepare her for this exciting career. 

Dr. Brown is the first guest in this year’s RDE-funded series, Humanities Career Spotlight. Intended as informational opportunities to for graduate students to think broadly about career possibilities for humanists, each Humanities Career Spotlight visitor will hail from a different part of the broader humanities ecosystem. Students, faculty, staff, community members and all are welcome.

About the speaker

Dr. Kenly Brown is a program officer for strategic initiatives at the Spencer Foundation. In her position, she organizes and implements strategic work and reviews across major grant programs. She is a Black feminist qualitative researcher who centers the study of Black girlhood, institutional violence and subversive dreaming. Dr. Brown employs creative ethnography to capture how Black girls experience and share what it feels like to survive interpersonal and institutional violence as students enrolled in a California continuation school. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of African and African American Studies. During her time there, she founded and led the Black Girlhood Studies Lab, housed in the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Equity, where students and collaborators explored, centered and supported Black girl life through research, community engagement and mentorship.