Shani T. Mott, a Black studies scholar at the Johns Hopkins University, died March 12, of cancer, four days before her 48th birthday, at her Homeland residence.
“Shani was an engaged and compassionate teacher. She had a rigorous and questioning mind and a tremendous love for the written word,” Tobie Meyer-Fong, professor and chair of the history department at Hopkins, wrote in an email.
“The amazing work she and her family did on ‘Storytime with Dr. Connolly’ reflects her creativity and range of her intellectual and personal commitments. I will always remember and be inspired by her warmth, courage, and care for community,” she said referring to the YouTube show Mrs. Mott and her husband, Nathan Connolly, made with their children.
Stuart Schrader, an associate research professor at Hopkins’ Center for Africana Studies, was both a colleague and friend.
“Shani was remarkably sweet, kind and generous in her everyday interaction and was a fun person to be around and you always left the conversation smiling,” Professor Schrader said.
“She really loved her students and they are mourning her loss which is a tangible palpable loss for them,” he said. “It just shows how much she meant to their lives of learning.”
Minkah Makalani got to know Professor Mott when he arrived at the Krieger School of the Arts and Sciences at Hopkins as director of the Center for Africana Studies.
“A constant presence and member of the Center for Africana Studies faculty, her spirit and thoughtfulness were always on display in how she engaged our work, mentored her students, and did the hard work of building the center,” Professor Makalani said in a statement to the Johns Hopkins Hub website that announced her death.
“She always displayed the best qualities of Black Study, insisting that we join the demanding scholarly standards of the field with a commitment to the socio-political concerns of Black people beyond the academy,” he said.
Shani Tahir Mott, daughter of Martin Mott, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, and Sandra Curtis, a school teacher, was born and raised in Chicago.
After graduating from Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Illinois, she earned a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies and English from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1998, and in 2005, obtained her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan.
From 2005 to 2008, Professor Mott was director of Africana Studies at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, where she also taught English.
In 2008, she began her tenure at Homewood.
“She was an interdisciplinary scholar of the ways racial language and ideas about race get formed by writers as well as by political structures and institutions,” according to a statement from Hopkins.
“Her dissertation focused on how mid-20th century writers of fiction and nonfiction strategically deployed racial language in American popular culture, exploring complex questions of sexuality, economic inequality, and political power.
“Those questions evolved into an exploration of how institutions — including foundations, universities, and governments — shape what race means and how power works.”
Tara Bynum, who earned her Ph.D. from Krieger School’s Department of Education at Hopkins, is an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Iowa: “She brought vigor to the discussion of African culture and literature and she thought it was important for her students to understand those ideas and how it relates to the discussion of African literature and African literary history,” Professor Bynum said.
“She always asked the hard questions that were focused and nuanced,” Professor Schrader said. “She never shied away from the difficult questions about race and racial identity, and for some people, it can be a way of pulling back from reality, but for her, it was a reckoning.”
Professor Mott had laid out the template for her life on her resume where she had written: “Social justice is my compass, equity my direction.”
In addition to her classroom work, she championed social justice and equity at not only Hopkins, but across the community.
From 2018 to 2019, she served as co-principal investigator of the Housing Our Story Project that examined the absence of Black staff and contract worker voices in Hopkins’ archives.
Professor Mott helped establish the university’s first social justice collective; curated a library exhibit on expressions of Black freedom and served on a committee focused on diversity in education.
Professor Mott founded and co-chaired a diversity initiative at the Bryn Mawr School and planned curriculum for Orita’s Cross Freedom School at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, where she was a member, and worked closely with Rev. Dr. Heber M. Brown III, the church’s senior pastor.
In 2005, she married Nathan Daniel Beau Connolly, an associate professor of history at Hopkins, and the couple settled into a four-bedroom home in Homeland.
In 2021, the couple sought to refinance their mortgage. They removed family photos, a “Black Panther” movie poster and other assorted memorabilia, after their initial appraisal “fell short of expectation, an outcome they believed was due to race and not the property’s condition,” reported The Baltimore Sun.
When they replaced family photos with those of whites, “a different appraisal company valued the house at nearly 60% more when the home appeared to be owned by white people,” reported The Sun.
The couple sued the appraisal company for “damages citing racial discrimination.”
“Litigation is going on and there is nothing else to report at this time,” Gabriel Diaz, who represents the couple and is with the law firm Relman Colfax, said in a telephone interview Thursday.
Professor Mott enjoyed knitting, playing tennis and watching movies.
“But her real hobby was education,” her husband said. Plans for a service are incomplete.
In addition to her husband of 19 years, she is survived by three children, London Connolly, 16, Clarke Connolly,14, and Elijah Connolly,10; and several cousins.
