My name is Kymara D. Sneed and I am a Ph.D. student hailing from Byron, Georgia. My research primarily focuses on 20^th century African American agriculture. My dissertation, Mississippi Mud, specifically focuses on racial discrimination as it pertains to the relationship between black farmers and the Cooperative Extension Service in Mississippi. I use this dynamic to analyze the extent of their (the farmers’) participation in civil rights activism and whether their clash with the Extension Service ran parallel with the Civil Rights Movement or if it was a movement all its own.

Academic Career

Graduate Research Assistant, The University of West Georgia, 2016 – 2018.
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Mississippi State University, 2018 – 2023

Lecturer, Mississippi State University, 2023 -

Publications and Presentations

Herd-Clark, Dawn and Kymara Sneed. "One Hundred Dozen Eggs: Margaret Toomer and the Ham and Egg Show."  In Middle Georgia and the Approach of Modernity: Essays on Race, Culture and Daily Life, 1885–1945, edited by Fred van Hartesveldt. Jefferson: McFarland, 2018.

Sneed, Kymara. “A Work in Progress: Finding Myself Through Extension”, Rural Women’s Studies, August 4, 2021. https://ruralwomensstudies.wordpress.com/2021/08/04/finding-myself-thro…

Panel Member, “A Tough Row to Hoe:  Black Farmers and a History of Struggle in the South,” February 12, 2018, Black History Month Panel, Mississippi State University.

Panel Member, “Out of House and Home: An Examination of African American Home Demonstration in Peach and Houston Counties, 1930 – 1940,” June 8, 2019, Agricultural History Society Conference, Washington, D.C.

Panel Member, “Starkville’s Finest: Race Politics and the Contributions of Sadye Hunter Wier,” August 12, 2020, 106^th Annual Meeting and Conference, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Virtual.

Panel Member, “Toeing the Line: An Analysis of Sadye Wier's Work Within Mississippi's Cooperative Extension Service.” May 15, 2021, 14^th Triennial Conference, Rural Women’s Studies Association, Virtual.

Panel Member, Roundtable on Gender and Rurality, “American Uniformity: Agricultural Pursuits Towards Building the Rural American Family,” April 1, 2022, 2022 OAH Conference on American History, Boston, Massachusetts.

Panel Member, “Money, Power, Respect? The Rural Southern African American Experience,” Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Montgomery, Alabama, September 29, 2022.

Panel Member, “Household Environments and Knowledge Production,” American Society for Environmental History, Boston, Massachusetts, March 25, 2023.

Awards

Scholars of the Earth Dissertation Award, 2022

Medgar and Myrlie Evers Research Fellowship Program, 2023

RRWG Research Support Award, 2023