Tao Leigh Goffe

Academic Year 2026-2027

Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow

Tao Leigh Goffe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is also an Associate Professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. She directs Dark Lab, a climate and racial justice research organization in Manhattan. She is the author of the book Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis , which was celebrated by the New York Times Book Review, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers’ Weekly, and the Guardian. Her research has been supported by awards from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Milkhood: A History of Wet Nursing in and beyond the Plantation

Tao Leigh Goffe’s fellowship project looks to Black women as the wet nurses of colonial modernity. Examining the testimony of enslaved African women who were forced to breastfeed, it asks how Black maternal labor sustained the plantation economy across the Americas. Milkhood considers the gastropoetics of refusal and the lasting nutritional impact on the microbiome of the present of how mothers on plantations were systematically erased, exploited, and rendered expendable by the dynamic of racial capitalism. Black mothering offers vital frameworks for imagining non-biological futures of maternity, paternity, and surrogacy beyond extraction, enclosure, and medical racism. The project is part of her forthcoming book Milk: A History, A Future, under contract with Doubleday.