The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of two assistant professors in history.

Beatrice Adams

Beatrice J. Adams is a historian of race, migration, and social movements whose research explores how racial and regional identities intersect to shape African Americans’ experiences of freedom and belonging. She received her Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora History from Rutgers-New Brunswick in 2021, an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2013, and a B.A. in History and Religion & Philosophical Studies from Fisk University in 2012. She is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the College of Wooster. In the fall of 2025, she will start a new position as an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

Her book in progress, We Might as Well Fight at Home: African Americans Claiming the American South, examines the experiences of African Americans who remained in and returned to the American South during the Great Migration and the emergence of the New Great Migration. She is also the co-editor of the forthcoming book Children of the Struggle, a collection of over twenty life narratives from members of the 1964 graduating class of Tuskegee Institute High School that explore their families’ decisions to remain in the American South during the Great Migration. Her writing has appeared in Southern Cultures, Black Perspectives, and the award-winning book series Scarlet and Black. Additionally, she recently appeared in the PBS documentary series “Great Migrations: A People on the Move.”

Her research has been supported by the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University.

Madeline Woker

Madeline Woker is a historian of European and French colonialism, capitalism, and taxation. She obtained her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was awarded the Clough Prize for the best dissertation in European history. She also holds an M.Phil. in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge and a dual Msc degree in European affairs from LSE and Sciences Po. Her work has appeared in Past & Present and the Journal of Global History as well as in edited volumes. She is now working on a book about the politics of taxation in the French colonial empire between the 1850s and the 1950s, and regularly writes for a larger audience about the history and politics of international taxation and the afterlives of empire and colonialism. She is also at the very early stages of a new project on “The Great Depression in the Age of Empire.”