• Ph.D., Indiana University, 2014
• M.A., Women’s and Gender Studies, DePaul University, 2009
• B.A., English, Fiction Writing Concentration, Northwestern University, 1986

Dr. Maria E. Hamilton Abegunde is the inaugural recipient of the Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Her research and creative activity center memory, trauma, and healing, and responds to the following questions: How do the unresolved traumas of our ancestors impact us? How can the arts create community-based spaces for researching historical harms? How can African-centered and contemplative practices help individuals and communities reflect on these traumas and harms without further injury, and in ways that lead to healing and justice?

Before coming to IU Dr. Abegunde worked in elementary school education for over 20 years and as an independent teaching artist. As a result of the latter, Captain Bill Pinkney invited her to be the lead team teacher for the first leg of Middle Passage Voyage project, an experiential voyage in which teachers from around the country were selected to sail and teach about the Middle Passage routes. Dr. Abegunde and her team sailed from Puerto Rico to Brazil over a two-month period. At the invitation of Dr. Sylvia Frey, Dr. Abegunde also served as poet and ritualist-in-residence for the UNESCO-Transatlantic Slave Trade Route-USA Project for eight years.

Dr. Abegunde is the author of one poetry collection, What Is Now Unanswerable, inspired by the 1992 murder of Tammy Zwicki, and two poetry chapbooks, including  Wishful Thinking about the 2001 disappearance of Tionda and Diamond Bradley in Chicago. She is the commissioned poet for the exhibitions Be/Coming, Keeper of My Mothers’ Dreams, Sister Song: The Requiem, Ancestral Masquerades, and the Lynch Quilts Project. She is a trained facilitator and trainer in Civic Reflection Dialogue and Powerful Conversations on Race.

Because of her work on intergenerational/ancestral trauma, community healing, arts-based practices, she was invited to join faculty in the School of Education at the University of Juba, South Sudan to help create a two-year Master’s program in Teaching Emergencies.

One of Dr. Abegunde’s long–term projects is the interdisciplinary, collaborative, and arts-based Stargazing: Re/Imagining the Life of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Breckenridgeat the Wylie House Museum.

When Dr. Abegunde is not teaching and working, she enjoys watching/reading science fiction and dancing.