Photo by matt d'annunzio

Maya Campbell ’15

history

Hometown: Silver Spring, Maryland

How Reed changed me: Reed taught me to never be afraid of my ideas, to never silence my voice, and to constantly reaffirm the value of my own individuality.

Word to prospies: Reed will push and stretch you in ways you didn’t even know you could bend. But part of that newfound flexibility is the greatest academic and social experience that you will ever have. Reed is a place where the learning never stops and frankly, it is a place where you will never want to stop learning.

Influential professor: Prof. Doug Fix [history 1990–] taught me how to view all kinds of things as historical artifacts. It was the first class that truly challenged me to reevaluate what it means to study history.

Outside the Classroom: Worked as a social justice educator. Spent a semester abroad in France. Traveled to London on a Reed grant to do research for my thesis. House adviser. Restarted the Black and African Student Union. Worked for the Peer Mentor Program. Spent a summer as a research assistant for Prof. Margot Minardi [history 2007–].

Obstacles I overcame: Reed was the first time I had ever been somewhere where I did not regularly see someone who looked like me or had a similar experience to my own.

Financial aid: Financial aid made it possible for me to stay at Reed and I will eternally be grateful for it.

Thesis: So we don’t have to beg anymore: Black Power and Self-Defense in Radical Social Movements in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s

What it’s about: How black/non-black and American/non-American radical social movements coming out of the late 1960s used black power and the ethno-political identity of “blackness” in their formulations of community self-defense.

What it’s really about: Interracial and international solidarity and collective responses to societal oppression in the postcolonial moment.

What’s next:  Antitrust paralegal at Cohen Milstein in Washington, DC.