Dr. Monica Kristin Blair is a public historian who specializes in histories of education and racial inequality in the United States. She is the Historian & Education Coordinator for the Hopkins Retrospective Project at Johns Hopkins University, where she conducts and shares research for the Reexamining Hopkins History Project, the Name Review Board, and other university history initiatives. She is also a lecturer in the Johns Hopkins Program in Museums and Society and the Director of the Hugh Hawkins Fellowship Program. Her current book project, Private Schools, Public Money: The Modern History of School Choice examines the history of racial inequality in the K-12 school privatization movement.
Dr. Blair has a Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Virginia and an extensive background in research, teaching, and public and digital humanities. She has contributed to multiple public projects that reckon with histories of racism in education including Johns Hopkins University’s Name Review Board, the University of Virginia’s President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, The UVA Department of Education’s Committee on Naming, and the Charlottesville City Schools Naming of Facilities Committee. She has also worked on several podcast and public radio projects, including BackStory, NPR’s Here & Now, and The Past, The Promise, The Presidency. She believes that a combination of deep historical research and community-based approaches to public history are key to building just and inclusive educational spaces.