Join Student Engagement, Diversity and Inclusion in a conversation with historian, Dr. Jesse Bayker via Instagram Live @officialbgsufirelands. Jesse Bayker is the digital archivist for the Scarlet and Black Project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. As part of this public history project, he is working to digitize archival materials that link Rutgers University, slavery and African American life in New Jersey from the 18th century to the present.

Bayker received a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University in May of 2019. He holds a B.A. in history with a minor in LGBTQ studies from CUNY Brooklyn College. His dissertation, “Before Transsexuality: Transgender Lives and Practices in Nineteenth-Century America,” examines transgender lives in the period before the advent of medical technologies for hormonal and surgical sex reassignment. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant from the American Historical Association.

He served as the Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in Museum Education at the Museum of the City of New York in 2017-2018. He completed a two-year fellowship in the Rutgers Predoctoral Leadership Development Institute and has served as chair of the History Department’s Committee on Minority Student Affairs.