Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. 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 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 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.
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's also currently working on a book on AI and race, in which she argues that algorithms have generated a counter-insurgent Black culture, a"synthetic blackness," that captures and constrains Black activism and sociality.
Gallon is the founder and director of two black digital humanities projects, The Black Press@200 Project and COVID Black. 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.
Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council and Spencer Foundation.
