Joyce-Zoe Farley

Visiting Assistant Professor This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Heritage Hall 360B
(205) 934-5634

Research and Teaching Interests: Black history and culture, urban rebellion, Black film and TV, Protest Documentaries, Black Intellectual Tradition, Black Liberation Theology, and Black English

Dr. Joyce-Zoe Farley is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Public History and African American Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has dual appointments in the History department and the African American Studies Program. Additionally, Dr. Farley is the Internship Director for both the History Department and African American Studies Program. Her research on urban insurrection of the 20th century, with the catalyst being Detroit 1967, uses oral history to tell a counternarrative to the many metanarratives about urban rebellion and the city, explicitly the troupes and ideas of Black agency, performance, trauma, resistance, and survival. Her nontraditional dissertation and documentary film on the subject “In Absentia: The Lost Ones of America’s/Motown’s Revolution(s)” is a protest film and has been used in classrooms and was featured in the 313 Afrikantown Film Festival and the Detroit Black Film Festival. Her varied portfolio in public history centered in the Black experience includes documentary filmmaking, an online photo exhibit and e-book, website development and management, and more. To see the trailer for her documentary, click below.

Before her second act in higher education, she was a media professional in several markets, including New York City, Phoenix, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Dr. Farley has a Bachelors of Arts in Broadcast Journalism from The Hampton University, a Masters in Oral History from Columbia University, a Graduate Certificate in Visual Anthropology from the University of Leiden (Leiden, Netherlands), and a Doctorate in African American and African Studies from Michigan State University. Currently, she is working on funding for Part Two of “In Absentia” and a book on Detroit and July 1967. She is a member of Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism Honor Society, Golden Key Honour Society, the Oral History Association, and various film/documentary groups.

In Absentia: The Lost Ones of America’s/Motown’s Revolution(s)" (Watch Trailer)