Heather Sanford
Research Manager
Heather Sanford received her PhD in history from Brown University. She brings extensive research, managerial, and outreach experience on projects that raise awareness about the historical roots of racism and its enduring, expansive reach in our world today.
Her dissertation unpacks the racist and antiracist work performed with food in Barbados and the broader British Atlantic during the enslavement era and in the decade following emancipation. In addition to her independent research, Heather has contributed to projects that translate scholarly work into accessible and actionable learning materials for public audiences. These projects include Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas (formerly the Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas) and a high school curriculum unit on Racial Slavery in the Americas: Resistance, Freedom, and Legacies (Choices Program, 2020), of which she was the lead researcher and writer.
Heather is honored to join her colleagues at the BU Center for Antiracist Research in fostering research, advocacy, and policies that get us closer to an antiracist society. Wielding the transformative power of history, we can confront the racist injustices and inequities of the present and create a future in which the promise of “liberty and justice for all” is finally fulfilled.