Bridget Laramie Kelly is an Instructor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in History from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines how Black Americans have historically contested the boundaries of freedom and citizenship and how the state has responded through law, policing, surveillance, and the formation of what she calls “probationary citizenship." Probationary citizenship describes a system in which full membership and freedom in the polity were preserved, recovered, or indefinitely withheld through ongoing state supervision and evaluation. Her scholarship spans the Civil War era and twentieth-century urban America and has appeared in the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Urban History, and Journal of Social History. Her current book project, Harlem on Probation: The Uprising of 1943, Black Self-Determination and the Formation of Probationary Citizenship, reinterprets the 1943 Harlem uprising as an expression of Black power while tracing the emergence of probation as a modern tool of racial governance in New York City. At the University of South Carolina, Kelly teaches Freedom Papers, a study of America’s founding documents which asks how the experiences of African Americans across U.S. history have and continue to shape the nation’s values, norms, and ideals.