Mora McLean

Mora McLean is interested in how American cultural understandings of “progress” and “development” were projected onto, and appropriated by, Africans and black educators and intellectuals in the Americas from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Building on years of work experience in the international nonprofit sector, in 2021 she began to transition toward intellectual inquiry and teaching first by earning an MA in History from Rutgers University. Her current research explores the buried and contested founding history and cultural milieu of the Africa-America Institute, an NGO co-founded in1953 by William Leo Hansberry, the little known twentieth century scholar of African antiquity and uncle of playwright Lorraine. She grew up in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, one of the former Danish West Indies and her father's ancestral home and has familial ties to Washington DC where her mother grew up.