Rona Carter is an Associate Professor of Psychology who is researching the off-time pubertal development of Black girls and how that is linked to elevated risks for depression, anxiety, and delinquency. Off time pubertal development is any pubertal timing that is significantly earlier or later than the average age range for a child's same-gender peers. Since Black girls are amongst the earliest to develop, they often face adultification bias and have to navigate situations that they may not be prepared for or have experience with.
Carter began noticing these differences when she was an undergrad working at an alternative school for girls with academic difficulties. As the intake person, she was tasked with taking the information from both the girls and their parents to gain information for the social worker who would be working with the students. Over time, Carter started to wonder why the girls were at this alternative school. She noticed that many of them were the same age, but they had different bodies and personalities, which made her start to wonder about development and whether puberty correlated with the girls ending up at an alternative school. Later, during grad school, she discovered that she wanted to be a developmental psychologist after a GSI told her that it is possible to change someone’s trajectory. She was in awe of the idea that, through interventions, it was possible to change someone from a negative downward trajectory to a positive upward one.
This was the start of Carter’s current project titled “Black Girlhood Unfolded: Reclaiming Puberty Narratives in a Digital Archive.” Building on her research, this new digital initiative addresses the need to understand off-time pubertal development and the challenges it entails. The initiative combines storytelling, peer support, and data collection to capture the lived experiences and provide a space for Black girls to find community, share stories, find coping guides, education videos, and be supported. At first, Carter held onto this idea, not sure if it was possible to even do something like this platform she was thinking of, but a conversation with some IT people at LSA convinced her she could. “They were talking about how this could work and I was just like, ‘oh my god, I guess this is… it could happen!” She not only learned that it was entirely possible to do it, but that a lot of people thought it was a really good idea.
Carter is passionate about making sure that Black girls feel supported during puberty since they are the first racial group to go through it, leaving them subject to adultification bias, and experiencing things that their white, Latina, and Asian peers are not yet experiencing. Carter’s work is helping to bridge racial inequalities by conducting research on Black girl puberty, which is tragically underrepresented, and creating a space for Black girls to find community, support, and resources during this time in their lives.
Carter is using this time as a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities to partner with girls, parents, and educators to build this platform to best support the needs of Black girls navigating this experience. During her time here at the Institute, the opportunity to interact with scholars trained in different fields has helped her apply some of their ideas to her work. Carter expressed that spending a year at the Humanities Institute has given her the opportunity to express her research in new ways. “There is just some aspect of the humanities that allows you to present something that may be a problem, something that might be a challenge, in a way that your audience is able to grasp it.”
Rona Carter is the 2025-26 Digital Scholarship Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humaniteis and Associate Professor of Psychology.
Jewell Mason is a 2025-26 Public Humanities Intern at the Instiute for the humaniteis and a fourth-year student majoring in History with a minor in Religion.
