Savannah G.M. Wood receives $25K fellowship to support research with Hopkins archival collections
The Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce that Savannah G.M. Wood has been awarded a $25,000 public humanities fellowship for 2024-25. The program, which was launched in 2022, supports Baltimore-based organizers, artists, cultural workers, and knowledge-creators as they research with and creatively interpret the university’s Special Collections and Archives.
Wood is an artist and writer with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. As executive director of Afro Charities, she works to increase access to the archives of the AFRO American Newspapers, the oldest family-owned African American newspaper in the United States.
“Savannah’s research and creative work exemplify how archives can uncover powerful narratives and contribute to meaningful social and institutional change,” said Joseph Plaster, director of the Tabb Center and curator in public humanities at the Sheridan Libraries and University Museums.
Central to Wood’s Tabb Center fellowship will be her current film project titled Hard to Get and Dear Paid For, a speculative documentary that traces seven generations of her family, from their enslavement in Montgomery County, Maryland to their emergence as entrepreneurs and civic leaders in Baltimore and Ontario, Canada.
“My research is centered on Baltimore’s post-emancipation period and explores the relationship between land ownership, inheritance, and generational wealth in Maryland,” said Wood. “The Tabb Center Public Humanities Fellowship is a huge support for me to pursue my research and to draw on the significant archival holdings at Johns Hopkins.”
Using the Baltimore Civil Rights History Project collection, Roland Park Company Papers, James Birney Collection of Anti-Slavery Pamphlets, and additional special collections material, Wood will investigate Baltimore’s social, political, and economic landscape from the mid-1800s to the present, particularly as it pertains to the lives of Black Marylanders emerging from enslavement. In addition, she will have the added benefit of engaging Hopkins archivists, faculty, post-docs, and students within History, Africana Studies, Film and Media Studies, and other related fields.
During her fellowship, Wood also plans to create an audio soundscape for use in her documentary and develop a concept for a podcast mini-series to accompany the film.