Speakers
- Rikki Byrd
- Northwestern University, PhD Student
Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator and scholar, with research interests in Black studies, visual culture, fashion history and cultural studies. She received her Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri – Columbia and her Master of Arts in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design. Her master’s thesis, “Black, the Color We Wear: Representing Blackness in American Fashion,” explored how blackness is centered in popular culture and offered a new approach to reimagining dialogue concerning the black body. As a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis, she developed new courses on the intersections of fashion and race for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the African and African American Studies department. Rikki is currently a Ph.D. student in African American Studies at Northwestern University.