Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has extensive teaching and research interests in African, Caribbean, and African Diaspora history. She holds a B.A. from Princeton and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her current book project, Housing Hartford, examines African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian migration to the Greater Hartford region through the lens of housing and mobility. In 2023, as director of EPOCH, Vernal partnered with CT Humanities to create an oral history infrastructure across the state and is at work on an exhibition on the history of shade tobacco in Connecticut.
