AAIHS OFFICERS

Current Executive Board

President: Shaun Armstead 

Shaun Armstead is a historian of twentieth-century Black women’s internationalism She earned her PhD in history from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her work considers the affective and interpersonal dimensions of the National Council of Negro Women’s Afro-Asian and Pan-African solidarities. In so doing, she considers how national identity and misperceptions enabled, undermined, and redirected these collaborative worldmaking endeavors distinct from leftist and nationalist iterations of Black internationalism. The Carter G. Woodson Institute for the Study of African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia has supported her research. The American Council of Learned Studies and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars have also endorsed her work. She is an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of California-Santa Barbara. 

Secretary: Candace Cunningham

Candace Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. She specializes in African American history, Women and Gender studies, and Public History. Her research is on the 20th century African American experience with a special emphasis on civil rights, education, gender, and the South.  Her 2021 article, “‘Hell is Popping Here in South Carolina’: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era” was published in the History of Education Quarterly. In 2022, she collaborated with the Boca Raton Museum of Art to conduct oral histories and write an essay to accompany the Black Pearls photography exhibit. The exhibit showcased Pearl City, Boca Raton’s oldest neighborhood and its only historically black community. Dr. Cunningham is currently finishing her manuscript on Black teacher activists in the civil rights movement. She is currently working on her manuscript about the role of Black school teachers in the civil rights movement. 

Treasurer: Mickell Carter

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her research interests include Black Internationalism, 20th-Century Social Movements, and the intersections between culture and politics. Her current project examines linkages between Black men’s style during the Black Power Movement, Pan-Africanism, and masculinity. Mickell has worked on several public history projects such as the Bloody Sunday Oral History project where she has interviewed Bloody Sunday Foot Soldiers and document their experiences. Mickell has also co-produced a documentary about the Civil Rights Movement in her hometown, Columbus, GA. She has written for several venues including: the AAIHS’s Black Perspectives, the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project’s Warbler newsletter, the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, and the Washington Post. She is also a host of the New Books Network in African American Studies podcast. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Mickell taught high school social studies in Columbus, GA.

Events Coordinator: Robert Greene II

Robert Greene II is an Associate Professor of History at Claflin University. He is co-editor, along with Tyler D. Parry, of Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Greene II is also a managing editor of Global Black Thought, Former President of the African American Intellectual History Society, and Publications Chair for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians. He also serves as the Lead Instructor for the Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights for the South Carolina Progressive Network. Dr. Greene II also co-hosts the award-winning podcast, Our New South, which is currently in its second season. He has also written for various publications, including The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, and Oxford American. Currently, Dr. Greene II is working on his book, The Newest South: African Americans and the Democratic Party, 1964-1994, which details how the Southern leaders of the Democratic Party in the post-Civil Rights era crafted strategies to attract, and hold onto, the Black vote across the nation.