Our Mission
The Royall House Association explores the meanings of freedom and independence before, during, and since the American Revolution, in the context of a household of wealthy Loyalists and enslaved Africans.
The Board and Staff
Executive Director
Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in the Department of American Culture in 2024. For the 2021-2022 academic year, Kyera Singleton was an American Democracy Fellow, in the Charles Warren Center, at Harvard University. She has held prestigious academic fellowships from the Beinecke Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
From 2018 through 2019, Kyera served as the Humanity in Action Policy Fellow for the ACLU of Georgia. As a policy fellow, she focused on mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and voting rights. She created the ACLU-GA’s first podcast series “Examining Justice” in order to highlight the voices of both community activists and policy makers in the fight for racial, gender, and transformative justice.
As a public history scholar, Kyera recently served as an advisor on the Boston Art Commission’s Recontextualization Subcommittee for the bronze Emancipation Group Statue. She is also a member of the Board of Public Humanities Fellows at Brown University, which brings together a collection of museum leaders from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
Board Officers
- Peter Gittleman, President and Treasurer, Historic New England
- Penny Outlaw, Vice President, HR Executive
- Cutty Thomas, Assistant Treasurer, WithumSmith+Brown, Certified Public Accountants and Consultants
- Jennifer Pustz, Recording Secretary, Tufts University
Board of Directors
- Michael Baenen, Community Volunteer
- Barbara Berenson, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (ret.)
- Anne Donaghy, Community Volunteer
- Amanda Hadad, Community Volunteer
- Mary McNeil, Tufts University
- Mary Kathryn Lee, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
- Collins Warren, Museum & Collector Resources
Honorary Director
- Julia Royall
Academic Advisory Council
- Rachelle V. Browne, Esq., Associate General Counsel, Smithsonian Institution (ret.)
- Alexandra Chan, Archaeologist / Author
- Steven Cohen, Department of Education, American Studies Program, Tufts University
- Rachel Fletcher, Upper Housatonic Valley African American Trail
- Frances Jones-Sneed, Department of History, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
- Joanne Pope Melish, Department of History, University of Kentucky
- Margot Minardi, Department of History, Reed College
- Margaret Vetare, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College