David Strickler is a PhD candidate who studies African American environmental history and the politics of memory from the Reconstruction Era to the present. For the 2026–2027 academic year, he is a Graduate Fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts.

David’s dissertation, “The Colors of Water: W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Aquatic Ecologies, and the Hydraulic Struggle for Abolition Democracy, 1898-1948,” examines the life and activism of Du Bois through his relation to bodies of water. The project considers how rivers, swamps, flood zones, beaches, pools, and others aquatic sites informed Du Bois as he developed a vision of Black radicalism that encompassed not only a domestic effort to dismantle Jim Crow, but a global working class movement to abolish poverty and empire around the world. Building upon the growing fields of Black Ecologies and Black Geographies, this study recovers a longer, broader history of environmental justice activism that demonstrates how aquatic ecologies have been contested sites of both struggle and belonging in the African diaspora.

David’s research has been supported by grants from the Agricultural History Society and the American Society for Environmental History, and he has presented his work through those organizations as well as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. With experience as a middle and high school history teacher and as an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), David aims to confront the harmful legacies of educational and religious institutions while also cultivating their potential for organizing grassroots movements.

Research Interests: African American History, 19^th and 20^th Century Environmental History, Black Ecologies and Geographies