Wendi N. Manuel-Scott

Affiliate Faculty (School of Integrative Studies)

Professor

Critical Race Pedagogy, African American History, Black Feminist Theory, Critical University Studies, Black Queer History, Student Protest Movements, Critical Black Geographies, and Black Childhood History

Dr. Wendi N. Manuel-Scott is a professor of Integrative Studies and History at George Mason University and a co-director of the Center for Mason Legacies (CML). She also holds affiliate appointments in Women and Gender Studies, African and African American Studies, and the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race. A scholar of Black life and resistance, her work foregrounds liberatory pedagogies, community-centered research, and courageous truth-telling. Through her work as an educator and community collaborator, she invites learners of all ages to unlearn dominant narratives and cultivate what Martin Luther King Jr. called “creative maladjustment”—a refusal to accept injustice and a courageous reimagining of our world.

Questions about power, belonging, visibility, and memory animate Dr. Manuel-Scott's scholarship. As a public scholar, she designs learning experiences and memorial practices that resist historical erasure. She co-led the creation of the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial. This multi-sited campus installation reclaims the narratives of the enslaved Black families whose labor supported the university's namesake. Her article "A Memorial Methodology from 'Another Field': A Liberatory Praxis," published in American Nineteenth Century History, theorizes this work as a radical intervention into public memory and academic historiography.

Under her co-leadership, CML has become a nationally recognized center for justice-rooted research and pedagogy. Among its most significant accomplishments is the Black Lives Next Door (BLND) project, a community-engaged course and research initiative that maps racial dispossession and Black resilience in Northern Virginia using geospatial technologies, archival research, and Black digital humanities. This project received funding from the LYRASIS Catalyst Fund and resulted in several public symposia, digital exhibits, and partnerships with local counties. Building on that work, Dr. Manuel-Scott and her colleagues partnered with the Fairfax County government to document the history of Black land ownership and segregation and with Loudoun County to curate public digital exhibits on the displacement of historic Black communities. One of these is the Village of Willard, a Black community that was destroyed to make way for the Dulles International Airport. These community partnerships have secured over $100,000 in public history contracts for CML, providing the necessary funding to support transformative research experiences for Mason students.

Now more than ever, she believes that classrooms should be sites of epistemic transformation, not obedience to frameworks of exclusion, and sites of disruptive truth-seeking, not the tyranny of tradition. Across her work, Dr. Manuel-Scott insists on pedagogy as a practice of care and disruption. She trains students not only to analyze systems of power but also to participate in reparative research that unsettles dominant narratives. She models what she calls a "critical care praxis," a practice that examines the afterlives of historical structural barriers while emphasizing the inherent dignity of all.

Dr. Manuel-Scott teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including African American Studies, Social Justice Education, Black Feminist Thought, Critical Race Studies, and Black Childhood Studies. Her curriculum is intentionally interdisciplinary, drawing from history, Black studies, gender studies, and liberatory pedagogies. Whether students are engaging Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation in a course on Black childhood or experimenting with citational fugitivity in a seminar on Black feminist intellectual genealogies, she fosters rigorous inquiry, ethical imagination, and practices of refusal. At the core of her pedagogy is the theory and praxis of undisciplining—a radical act of interrogating and disassembling the epistemic foundations of academic disciplines that have historically served as instruments of White supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism. For Dr. Manuel-Scott, inclusion is not the antidote to exclusion. Rather, undisciplining asks educators and students to recognize the disciplinary investments in whiteness that sustain epistemic violence.

Her teaching cultivates alternative ways of learning and being within the modern university. Across her courses, assignments include archival research, speculative historical storytelling, collaborative community research, and disruptive citation methods that treat citation not as a transaction but as a practice in intellectual collaboration and care. Students do not simply learn about marginalized voices—they center, cite, and co-create with them. She asks students to move beyond the mastery of content and into the co-creation of emancipatory knowledge-making and memory-making. In all her classrooms, she is committed to teaching that affirms complexity, cultivates intellectual bravery, and positions education as a tool for freedom and imagination.

While her many honors include the George Mason University Faculty of the Year (2021), the Teaching Excellence Award (2019), and the Alcalde Medal for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion (2017), she continues to look ahead. She envisions a sustained commitment to transformative scholarship and the curation of learning spaces where memory fuels possibility, and students become confident researchers, problem-solvers, and lifelong learners. Her vision centers on dignity, radical empathy, and a commitment to building historical knowledge that courageously reckons with the past while actively creating the conditions for a more just future.

Education

Ph.D. in History, Howard University

In the Media

An interview about the Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial project (Full Audio) or watch a video showcasing the memorial. See also: WUSA9 Report, DC News Coverage, and the Loudoun Now Media Coverage.

A collaboration with the John Lewis High School Leadership Program, where high schoolers were introduced to digital storytelling. Check out a video about the JLHS student projects.

Professor Manuel-Scott is a regular keynote speaker at graduation ceremonies, libraries, and schools. In August 2014, she gave the keynote address at the Mason New Student Convocation. The speech is also available here.

Professor Manuel-Scott started the Paul Robeson Saturday Leadership Academy at Mason, a Saturday STEM program for 7th to 10th-grade students who are underrepresented in the STEM fields. Students participate in game design, robotic programming, ebook design, leadership development, goal-setting workshops, and time management activities. Watch a video of one Saturday session.