Dr. Battle earned her PhD in literature from The University of Cincinnati.  Her research interests include African American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Black Feminist Studies, Critical Race Epistemology, and Hip-Hop Studies. 

 

In October of 2023, Dr. Battle was named as the Artist as Instigator Resident for the National Public Housing Museum. Dr. Battle’s project, Place, Space, Werkz, used the art form Chicago Footwork to examine Chicago’s history of housing injustice through various examples of housing violence. It was a three-phase project that culminated in a production, where six youth drew from their political education experience to tell the stories of housing violence through their dancing bodies and other forms of Black artistic expression.

Dr. Battle’s other current research project—for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant—also focuses on Chicago Footwork, which she defines as an embodied vernacular dance of liberation.  Her forthcoming manuscript explores Chicago Footwork’s potential for nation-building, homemaking, and self-actualizing, in response to the socio-political exile, “homelessness,” and negation experienced by its practitioners.  Dr. Battle is concurrently directing and producing a forthcoming docuseries on the culture and art form (of which she is a practitioner), titled, Footwork Saved My Life: The Evolution of Chicago Footwork (2026). The documentary examines how each of the five generations of Chicago Footwork are catalyzed by the structural forces that shape the lives of Black youth on Chicago’s South and West sides.  

Dr. Battle is currently a fellow with the Chicago’s Archives + Artists Project (CA + AP), which aims to pair artists with archivists across academic and cultural institutions, with the goal of experimenting with new and creative ways that preserve the legacies of our communities’ culture, histories, and spirits. The theme of the 2025 pairings is “Embodying the Archives.” As artist, Dr. Battle’s multi-disciplinary work on Chicago Footwork serves as fodder for imagining how Chicago Footwork preserves the cultural legacies and personal stories of its progenitor’s. related to Chicago’s history of housing violence.