Marcia Walker-McWilliams
Executive Director
Marcia Walker-McWilliams is Executive Director of the Tulane University History Project, a long-term project engaging the impacts of slavery, segregation, and issues of racial equity at Tulane University. She is a former Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC). She received a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree in Social Policy and African American Studies from Northwestern University. She is the author of Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-author of The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience and Justice (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) with Traci Parker.
Dale Hall
Senior Manager for Planning & Special Assistant
Dale currently serves as a Senior Manager for Planning & Special Assistant, supporting and facilitating the Office of the President's strategic initiatives and daily operations. He is a key liaison between the President's Office and the Tulane University History Project, providing administrative support and facilitating student engagement.
Before his role at Tulane, Dale performed duties in new student orientation, first-year experience, student-athlete development, student organization management, and event services. He holds a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's degree in higher education administration from the University of Mississippi.
Nicolas Bell-Romero
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Nicolas Bell-Romero is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Tulane University History Project. He was a Research Associate with the University of Cambridge’s Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge’s investigation into its historical connections to slavery, colonialism, and the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. He received a Ph.D. in early American History from the University of Cambridge and BAs in Economics and History from the University of Sydney, Australia. He is finalizing two monographs for publication: The University of Cambridge in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) and Fighting Words in the American Revolution (under review at University of Virginia Press). He is currently working on a centuries-long history of governmental compensation to slaveholders in the United States of America and the British Empire. Though a specialist in eighteenth and nineteenth-century North American history, he has also published work exploring institutional ties to modern coerced labor regimes.
Cécile Yezou
Research Assistant
Cécile is a Research Assistant for the Tulane History Project, working on the oral history component of the project. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, after completing her Ph.D. in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She earned her undergraduate and master's degrees at Paris IV - Sorbonne in American History and French Language & Literature. Her current book project is tentatively titled " A 'Very Jim Crow' Experience: Black Women's World-Making in the Wake of Racialized Sexual Violence in the U.S. South, 1894-1947." She is the archivist for A Long Walk Home (ALWH), a national art organization based in Chicago that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. Her research interests are rooted in Black Studies' interdisciplinarity, with an emphasis on Black Feminist Thought, history, and critical trauma studies.
