The Story Beyond the Record: Lessons from Researching Black Panther Leader Ericka Huggins - Art of Teaching Friday Forum

The Story Beyond the Record: Lessons from Researching Black Panther Leader Ericka Huggins

Drawing from the research behind Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins, this presentation examines what happens between encountering evidence and making a historical claim, and how that research process has shaped the classroom. Using the research on Ericka Huggins as a case study, the presentation explores how historians follow evidence across different kinds of sources, navigate gaps and contradictions, and determine what can and cannot be responsibly claimed about a historical subject. It then considers how these experiences have informed Phillips’s teaching, particularly how she helps students question sources, recognize silences and competing perspectives, work with uncertainty, and develop arguments that are well supported by the available evidence. Faculty participants will be invited to consider how similar research habits and interpretive practices might be adapted to their own disciplines and classrooms. Register Now for The Story Beyond the Record Session.

Mary Frances Phillips is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins, winner of the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. Her research and teaching focus on Black women’s political histories, Black feminist politics, archives, biography, and the Black freedom struggle.