About

Ayana Omilade Flewellen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, specializing in Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, memory, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery and its afterlives. They are a Black Feminist, archaeologist, artist scholar, and storyteller whose scholarly work is rooted in critical theory and Black feminist epistemology and pedagogy. Flewellen's intellectual genealogy shapes their approach to designing, conducting, and producing scholarship, as well as advocating for greater diversity within archaeology and academia. Flewellen is the co-founder and current Board Chair of the Society of Black Archaeologists and serves on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. Since joining Stanford in July 2022, they have contributed to the department through research and teaching in their areas of interest. Their work has been featured in prominent outlets such as National Geographic, Science Magazine, PBS, and CNN, and they regularly present at institutions including The National Museum for Women in the Arts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Archaeology
• History
• Computer Science
• Law
• Social Science
• Demography
• Art history
• Engineering

Selected publications

• An Aural Ethnography of Black Breath

  liquid blackness · 2025-04-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article discusses embodied practices of submerged breathing in waterscapes connected to the translatlantic slave trade. The central question this article addresses is: How does submerged Black breath sonically liberate new understandings of the past and present? Specifically, the article explores acts of submerged breathing carried out by Black scuba divers at submerged sites of enslavement as an expression of Black aurality that critically examines Black life. It argues that these fugitive practices of submerged existence cut across space and time. The article explores these embodied practices of breathwork in the author's dive experience and the experiences of two men, Kamau Sadiki and Jay Haigler, at a submerged site of enslavement, the Clotilda shipwreck in Mobile, Alabama. The author's attention to what is made possible when one attunes oneself to submerged breathing practices builds on the scholarship of Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her text Undrowned and Ashon Crawley's text Blackpentecostal Breath. Breathwork here demonstrates oceanic-rooted modes of memory making and commemoration that create breath-giving experiences that work to alchemize and heal transgenerational trauma.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery Signaled through Coral Architectural Stones at Heritage Sites on St. Croix

  American Antiquity · 2024-10-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article concerns itself with how archaeologists and other heritage studies professionals contend with temporal collapse on landscapes that hold African Diasporic histories. Coral stones lay the foundation of colonial architecture on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. This article explores how buildings constructed of coral stones during the colonial era are still in use today, either restored or repurposed, along with examples of how coral is being used as an artistic medium in contemporary sculptures that collapse time and demand heritage studies professionals to tend to the persistence of colonial violence in the present. Here, coral—via the structures built out of it—is discussed as a mnemonic device for the biophysical afterlife of slavery. In this article, linear temporal distinctions of past, present, and future are called into question on St. Croix, where colonial structures act as ruptures in conceptualizations of time and serve as palimpsestual reminders of the past in the present.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• John L. Cotter Award in Historical Archaeology: Alicia D. Odewale

  Historical Archaeology · 2024-03-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Diving With a Purpose:

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2023-09-19

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Digging in Our Grandmother’s Gardens: Black Women Archaeologists in the United States from the 1930s to the Present

  Women in engineering and science · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diving With a Purpose

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2023-09-19

  book-chapter

  This chapter provides an historical overview of the formation of Diving with a Purpose (DWP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation and protection of submerged heritage resources by providing education, training, certification, and field experience to adults and youth in the fields of maritime archaeology and ocean conservation. A special focus of DWP is the protection, documentation, and interpretation of African slave trade shipwrecks and the maritime history and culture of African Americans. DWP participants and members are volunteer citizen scientists who provide the skills and labor for various projects, expeditions, and field work conducted worldwide in collaboration with national and international partners. By illuminating the environmental and cultural conservation and preservation programs hosted by DWP, this chapter discusses the importance of citizen scientists, and how such community-based efforts are transformative to the field of maritime archaeology.

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnic‐Racial Socialization Among Mothers of Black and Black‐White Biracial Daughters During the Pubertal Transition

  Journal of Research on Adolescence · 2022-01-19 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Ethnic‐racial socialization is a salient component of parenting in Black families. What is less clear is how Black families discuss ethnicity‐race and social inequalities with pubescent children. We examined associations between pubertal timing and ethnic‐racial socialization among mothers ( M age = 42) of Black ( n = 286) and Black‐White biracial ( n = 233) girls aged 9–12. Moderation by maternal stress about puberty was also examined. Results indicated mothers of Black girls who were stressed about puberty reported more preparation for bias; whereas both groups of mothers reported more cultural socialization. Early pubertal timing and high maternal stress about puberty predicted more cultural socialization among both groups and more egalitarian beliefs among only mothers of Black‐White biracial girls. The findings highlight the importance of ethnic‐racial socialization during puberty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dress and Labor: An Intersectional Interpretation of Clothing and Adornment Artifacts Recovered from the Levi Jordan Plantation

  Archaeologies · 2022-03-25 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Through an examination of clothing, adornment, and hygiene artifacts recovered from the Quarters area of the Levi Jordan Plantation, this article examines how racial, gendered, and classed operations of power and oppression shaped African American women’s sartorial practices, as an aspect of identity formation, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Texas. Through a Black feminist framework, this article focuses on the ways African American women dressed their bodies for the types of labor they performed to discuss how they negotiated ideologies of race, gender, and class, that shaped hegemonic notions of femininity during the post-emancipation era.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Creating Community and Engaging Community: The Foundations of the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands

  International Journal of Historical Archaeology · 2021 · 38 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Archaeology
  • Political Science

  This article discusses how Co-Principal Investigators that designed and executed the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project (ELPAP) came together as a community, to demonstrate how such a formation within the discipline, with all its ups and downs, facilitates the skills needed to conduct community archaeology. By using the ELPAP as a case study, this article provides a multiscale examination of the ELPAP, expanding the discourse on community archaeology to include community building practices among archaeologists, between organizations, and with communities impacted by archaeological work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist”: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter

  American Antiquity · 2021 · 134 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Archaeology
  • History

  This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alexandra Jones

  University of Worcester

  9 shared

• Justin Dunnavant

  University of California, Los Angeles

  6 shared

• Tsione Wolde-Michael

  Smithsonian Institution

  6 shared

• Alicia Odewale

  University of Tulsa

  5 shared

• Maria Franklin

  The University of Texas at Austin

  3 shared

• William A. White

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

• Zoë Crossland

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• Christopher Fennell

  1 shared