Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. As a versatile scholar, her work explores how everyday Black people challenge systems of power through print news, the institution of the Black Church, and emerging technologies. Specializing in contestation in early 20th-century Black newspapers and the Black Church, she examines how gender and sexuality were negotiated in public and sacred spaces. Her research on data interrogates synthetic data, AI, and medical imaging—especially in the social and technological context of breast cancer—to uncover how race is represented, erased, or contested in algorithmic systems. By bridging archival and digital methods, she centers Black contestation as a mode of survival, speculation, and transformation across time and space.
Gallon's first book, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) and argues that African American newspapers fostered Black sexual expression, agency, and identity in the first half of the twentieth century.
As the author of the field-defining article, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” Gallon has established the black digital humanities as a viable approach to digital scholarship.
Her forthcoming book, The Dancing Evangelist: George Wilson Becton and the Politics of Contestation in the Black Church (NYU Press, 2026), focuses on the early twentieth-century Black Church as a site of contestation. In addition, Gallon is the co-editor of the collection, Forging Freedom: The Black Press at 200 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), which commemorates the 200-year anniversary of founding of the Black Press in 1827.
She is currently engaged in two book projects. The first examines the intersections of AI and race, arguing that algorithms have produced a counter-insurgent Black culture, what she terms a “synthetic Blackness,” that works to capture and suppress Black activism and sociality. The second project is a historical study of Black women and breast cancer in the United States. Gallon is also working on a collection of short stories about African Americans' lived encounters with Ghana.
The primary lead on two black digital humanities projects, The Black Press@200 Project and COVID Black, Gallon is committed to public-facing work. She also serves as the director of the Community Health Informatics Data Lab, where she and her team are using AI to develop a digital research project on Black women and breast cancer, as well as provide justice-oriented AI literacy education to young Black and Brown artists in Providence.
Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, and Spencer Foundation.
