She’s halfway through her initial year as the new Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Mia Bay is sitting in the light-filled study of a friend’s house on Long Island – her first significant break from Cambridge since starting the job.

“This is one of those vacations where work trails you,” she says. “But fortunately, I’m with friends who are also trailing work. We work, and then at some point we stop working.”

Bay laughs, which she does easily and often. “I hope to get to the beach for a swim today, though.” It’ll be well-deserved respite if she does, for Bay’s schedule has, she admits, been “hectic” since her first day mid-January.

A renowned scholar of African-American history, with particular interest in intellectual and women’s histories, she’s also an energetic collaborator and administrator.

The Mellon chair appealed, she explains, because of the opportunities it offered in all these areas. “I’d never been to Cambridge – didn’t have dreams of moving to England, or anything like that.

But during the interview process it became clear this was a role that offered everything I was looking for. I’d be collaborating with lots of people, working directly with students, running a seminar.

I’d been director of the Centre for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, and knew these varied activities were stimulating for me.” She wasn’t fazed by the observation of one colleague that the British did American history differently.

“In Britain there’s more focus on the US in the world, whereas Americans may study American history in isolation. But other areas, such as the expansion into the West, or Indigenous histories, don’t get as much attention. I’m still figuring out those differences, but American history is certainly popular at Cambridge.”

Indeed, one of the projects at the top of Bay’s to-do list is to establish a major interdisciplinary centre for the study of the United States in Cambridge.

“The History department already has very strong Americanist content, and there are many other people who study the US in fields such as political science, sociology and English,” she says.

Few of Wells’s own papers survive, so Bay had to work it out herself, by trying to understand how Wells would have been experiencing things.

“She was a tremendous consumer of newspapers, so I read them too.” And in their pages, Bay found the theme of her third book, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, a history of mobility and resistance that explores travel discrimination and how it has shifted from segregated trains and buses, and gas stations and motels, to modern experiences that include taxis and Ubers.

Just as she was preparing for publication, the killing of George Floyd thrust the persistence of racist inequalities into the global spotlight.

“There was a really dramatic change,” Bay recalls. “It brought constant enquiries and interest in Black history, which still hasn’t died down yet. I appreciate that, because it’s such a vital field in American history.

But it was also so upsetting.

You could barely turn on the television without seeing George Floyd dying, and so many other incidents were in the news. It felt traumatic, sometimes, being asked to talk about it.”

Traveling Black was published in 2021 and brought Bay multiple awards and national attention. To complete it, she had set aside another project that now has her full attention – a study of Thomas Jefferson.

It, too, sprang from engagement with the social and intellectual lives captured in 19th-century Black newspapers.

“I went into those papers expecting to find discussions of Black nationalism in Africa predominating,” she says, “and was surprised to discover instead much discussion of Jefferson.

This tells an interesting story about the relationship of African-Americans to American nationalism, and to someone who’s a powerful symbol of what America means.

“At that time, African-Americans mostly weren’t voters, so they were reaching out to what Jefferson stood for much in the way that lower-class people prior to the Revolution might have appealed to the king, or the values articulated by the royal family.

I want to explore what the presidency means for people who don’t really have political power – how they use it to lay claims on the state.”

It’s an analysis that feels timely, when the American political climate seems, to many, to be tilting back against the movements and events of five years ago.

“There’s a backlash against tearing down Confederate monuments,” Bay says.

“It’s reported that they’re putting one back up in Washington DC, and Trump is restoring the Confederate names of army camps that were renamed under Biden. So it’s an interesting time to be an African-American historian.

A fraught time, as well, because there are some states that are trying to get rid of teaching African-American history.