![\"Dr.](\"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/ursca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/86\/2024\/06\/Leroy-Headshot-1024x1022.jpg\")
Dr. Myers is a historian specializing in African American and Native American history, whose research interests include African American migration to the American West during the 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> centuries, enslaved\/African American community-building, Native American slavery and captivity, and African American and Native American relations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A Baltimore native, Dr. Myers earned his B.A., magna cum laude<\/em>, from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where he majored in History and conducted thesis research on Native Americans in U.S. popular culture in the 1990s. He then enrolled in the University of Oklahoma, where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History. His M.A. thesis examined the development of Oklahoma\u2019s Black towns, while his doctoral dissertation explored the impact of Black migration on Oklahoma in the decades leading up to its statehood in 1907. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Hell and the Promised Land: Black Migration West to Kansas<\/em>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In addition to publishing and presenting his research and teaching U.S. history at the college level, Dr. Myers has long been engaged in public humanities. He has worked in the Western History Collections at the University Oklahoma, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and has curated public exhibitions on such themes as the cultural iconography of the West, Black activism, and LGBTQ activism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Myers to Hopkins and especially to URSCA because of his deep commitment to undergraduate research. In teaching U.S. history for more than seven years, he has trained countless students in conducting primary source research. Several of his students have won awards for the essays they produced in his classes, and in recognition of his successful mentorship, he was invited to speak on the panel \u201cDoing Undergraduate Research in Early American Studies\u201d at the Society of Early Americanists\u2019 annual meeting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n