Emily Musil was an undergraduate at Drew University when she first heard about the Nardal sisters of Martinique during a required course on Francophone literature of the Caribbean and Africa. The class piqued her interest, but when she researched these seven sisters, she kept coming to a dead end: "Books would reference ‘the group surrounding the Nardal sisters,’" Emily says, "and then say very little about who they were."

From her study of the Harlem Renaissance, Emily knew that scholars were often late to recognize women writers, so she began her quest to learn more about them, especially Paulette, the oldest. "I became a woman obsessed," she says, "but as an undergraduate there’s only so much you can do.".

As soon as she could, however, Emily applied to UCLA to pursue her research as a graduate student in the History Department’s African field. The Nardal sisters and their experiences are the heart of a dissertation that will examine how Black intellectuals of the African Diaspora looked at larger issues of feminism, colonialism, and race relations in the early 20th century. Although the work is not biographical, the search began there, and it was a challenging start.

All of Paulette Nardal's papers went to the bottom of the Atlantic when a German torpedo struck the ship she was traveling on during World War II, and the family home in Martinique burned to the ground in the 1950s. Searching the archives at UCLA, at Howard University, in Martinique, and in Paris, Emily found no historical evidence on the sisters but "little clues" that she pursued—the address where Paulette lived in Paris, for example, so that Emily could walk around the neighborhood.

And Emily had some extraordinary luck. During a French class in Martinique, Emily told the instructor about her interest in Paulette Nardal. "She said, ‘Oh yeah, she was my teacher for a while,’ and told me anecdotes about her, how she carried herself," Emily said. The instructor also introduced Emily to the surviving son of one Nardal sister, and he has provided some additional leads. On the same trip, searching in the archives of Martinique, Emily came across La Femme Dans La Cite, a journal and newsletter of feminist ideas that Paulette published when she returned home after World War II, and before Nardal’s work for the United Nations. It was a major discovery—the first time this publication came to light.

The Martinique journal and other pieces of Emily’s research have already been presented at conferences. The sisters were "among the first black women to be educated in Paris," Emily says, and their activities reflect "the shifting boundaries of their identity." In terms of race, they were allied with the Pan African Movement, and some refer to them as "the godmothers of Négritude," the first large-scale movement to bring non-Western ideas to the Western world. Paulette was active in seeking suffrage for women. In an interesting confluence, Paulette founded La Revue du Monde Noir (Black World Review), a Pan African journal tacitly opposed to colonial ideas, in the same year that she worked for the French colonial administration writing travel guides.

Still a woman obsessed, Emily’s research will take her to Paris, Martinique, and Senegal, where Paulette Nardal was an intellectual colleague of the country’s founder and first president, Leopold Senghor. Emily hopes his papers will include some information about Paulette.

The research in Senegal also will ground her work in Africa, her field of specialization—"I want to make sure I stay rooted on the continent," she says. Nevertheless, the Department of History and her dissertation co-chair, Ned Alpers, have supported her in crossing not only regional but disciplinary boundaries to pursue her project. "Although her major field is African history," Professor Alpers says, "she’s actually doing Atlantic history with a focus on the Francophone world."

Ghislaine Lydon, her other co-chair, says Emily’s work puts her "at the forefront of a new way of understanding world history," conducting research in several countries, multiple cultures, and a number of languages—in this case, French, English, and West African Wolof.

To do this kind of work, Emily came to the right place, a department where scholarly research often crosses the Atlantic between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Besides Professor Alpers, who studies the African Diaspora from the East African perspective, and Professor Lydon, an expert on Francophone West Africa, her dissertation committee includes Robin Derby, a Caribbeanist; Ellen DuBois, a historian of the women’s movement, and Francoise Lionnet, chair of French and Francophone Studies.

The selection provides "a good example of the intellectual riches of UCLA," Professor Alpers says. In History, graduate students are encouraged to explore those riches and "find their own way," he says. "Then, we support them. We get them funded, get them finished, get them jobs.".

Emily is still in the first category, awaiting word about grant applications while she works as an Adjunct Professor at American University in Washington, D.C., teaching "Contemporary Africa" and "African Civilizations." As a teaching assistant, Professor Alpers says, Emily was well-organized "and full of the kind of enthusiasm that undergraduates find infectious.".

Emily urges her students to make connections between the history they study and the contemporary world. If they’re studying 16th-century Mexico, for example, she asks them, "Why do we care about it? How does this history relate to our lives?".

Emily would be pleased if their answers led them into an activist role in contemporary affairs. Coming from a family that modeled involvement in political life, Emily has already fleshed out her academic résumé with work as a paralegal in civil rights cases and involvement in Oxfam America, Africa Action, and the Global Fund for Women. In Washington, she is volunteer assistant to the director of the African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation.

"I want to make sure that what I'm doing is always rooted in something that will have a positive impact," she says. "I don't want to just study a culture from an armchair or look at it through a magnifying glass without being actively involved.".

At UCLA, Emily was a member of the Africanist Activist Association and an officer in the department’s Graduate Student Association, participating in departmental meetings and a faculty search. As Professor Lydon says, "She’s already behaving like a young scholar. She’s a very advanced student." .

Published in Winter 2005, Graduate Quarterly