Scholar. Researcher. Writer.
One of my favorite quotes from author and scholar Zora Neale Hurston is, "research is formalized curiosity". I have always been curious. In elementary and middle grades, I was awarded most curious or most likely to ask questions (admittedly, not all of my teachers liked or encouraged this behavior). My parents loved that I asked questions. They always had answers. However, the answer was often, "Why don't you go look that one up?" My parents taught me how to formalize my curiosity - to look it up.
I am a Black womanist rhetorician, digital humanist, and cultural strategist. I hold space where recovery meets resistance—where archival silences are opened and Black futures are charted, not merely imagined. As a Professor of Communication and the founding Director of the Center for Africana Futures at Texas Southern University, I design and sustain work that centers Black intellectual traditions, insists on public accountability, and harnesses the power of narrative to name and transform.
My scholarly labor is rooted in the deep conviction that Black stories matter—how we tell them, who gets to hold them, and what they make possible. In 2025, I served as Consulting Producer for The Inquisitor, a bold, genre-bending documentary about Congresswoman Barbara Jordan that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The Inquisitor wrestles with the boundaries of truth, myth, and memory in telling the story of a woman who carried both the weight and the wonder of democratic possibility. It was a pleasure to contribute to director Angela Tucker's vision of Jordan's rhetoric, archives, and political theology, which were treated with analytical rigor and cultural care.
My recent writing continues these themes. In 2025, I published “Black Parade: Marching Toward a Future of Resistance and Renewal in Texas Education” in Communication and Democracy—a reflection on curriculum wars, the surveillance of Black thought, and what it means to teach toward freedom. As a Co-PI on the Mellon-funded Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon), I build infrastructures for digital ethnic studies that are led by us, built for us, and never forget us.
I've spent my academic life curating digital archives, fostering media literacy across HBCUs, mentoring scholars of color, and posing difficult questions about what is recovered, what is erased, and who gets to speak. My digital recovery work ranges from White Violence, Black Resistance to the Prairie View Women's Oral History Project, and I bring that same ethos to my YouTube channel, “Enjoy the Bounty of Planning with Dr. Toniesha Taylor."
The channel is a space of intellectual nourishment—a place to reframe strategic planning as a Black cultural practice and talk freely about higher education, digital futures, narrative control, and Black life in all its complexity.
I also collaborate nationally as an affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU. I work alongside scholars committed to dismantling structural erasures in tech, media, and pedagogy. As a National Teaching Partner with the Colored Conventions Project, I educate and collaborate with those who recognize that Black organizing, literacy, and recovery work are not optional but foundational.
Within the discipline, I serve as the Book Review Editor for the Quarterly Journal of Speech, where I help foster critical conversations that shape rhetorical study. I remain active in the National Communication Association and have been a longtime member of the Western States Communication Association. I bring that same commitment to community through my lifelong affiliations with Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, and the California State University, San Marcos Alumni Association.
I write. I teach. I produce. I build. And I do it all with a deep commitment to Black communities, to womanist epistemologies, and to the power of language as a tool of both survival and speculation.