Leigh Raiford’s time at the Center will be devoted to working on a book project entitled "Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: History, Memory, and the Photography of Twentieth-Century African American Social Movements." This study, which examines the role of photography in the African American freedom struggle, reveals the premium that activists placed on photography as a democratic medium through which to visually engage political categories, as well as to mobilize participants. Reinserting multiple corpuses of photographs into histories of anti-lynching, civil rights, and black power movements, Raiford, an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department, situates the study of race and photography within the larger framework of United States cultural history.