A woman with curly hair, glasses, and earrings that say 'Black Lives Matter,' smiling for a photo indoors.

Dr. Kami Fletcher

Dr. Kami Fletcher is an Associate Professor of African Diasporic History & Coordinator of Africana Studies at Goucher College. She teaches courses that center the African experience throughout the Diaspora unpacking social and cultural history all at the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Her research centers on African American burial grounds, late 19th/early 20th century Black female and male undertakers, and contemporary Black grief and mourning.

Dr. Fletcher is the guest editor for Southern Cultures winter 2026 issue on “Death and Grieving”. She is the co-editor of Grave History: Death, Race & Gender in Southern Cemeteries from Antebellum to the Post-Civil Rights Era (University of Georgia Press, 2023) and Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) and a host of other articles and book chapters including: “ ‘I’m Afraid That When the Devil Come Take My Master’s Body, the Devil May Mistake and Get Mine:’ Necro-Armor and African American Death Ideology” (Critical Sociology, 2025) and “Black Women Undertakers of the Early Twentieth Century Were Hidden in Plain Sight (Meridians Journal, 2023).

She served as the Humanities Advisor for the PA Hallowed Ground Project (2022-2024) and the past Historical Consultant for Mount Harmon Plantation (2017-2018) and John Dickinson Plantation (2021-2023). In 2018, she co-founded CRDS and since 2019 has served as President.

Currently, Dr. Fletcher is working on a manuscript that historicizes African American death care workers in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest United States.