Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (known as “Dr. B” on campus) is a womanist sociologist.  She came to Grinnell in fall 2019 and teaches the three core courses (Intro, Theory and Methods, and Senior Seminar) as well as the electives Growing up Girl, Feminist Educations, and Beyond the Little Mermaid: Race, Gender, and the Global Waters. A qualitative researcher, she focuses on Black women’s contemporary and historical acts of self-definition.  Her published work has examined Black women’s pedagogy as a form of “politicized mothering,” the embodied costs of being a strong Black woman, and the liberal arts vision of “living abundantly” championed by Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first trained African American student affairs professional.  Increasingly interested in higher education histories and narratives of belonging, she is at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled, 'No one’s better than you’: Edith Renfrow Smith and the nurturing of a Black girlhood in a white midwestern town, 1914-1937.