Save the Date: Global Black Thought Webinars
Save the Dates:
July 23 and July 30 at 2pm Eastern
The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and the University of Pennsylvania Press is hosting two upcoming webinars (June 23 and June 30 at 2pm Eastern) to celebrate the recent launch of Global Black Thought, the official journal of AAIHS. Edited by renowned Brown University historian Keisha N. Blain, the journal is devoted to the study of the Black intellectual tradition. It features original, innovative, and thoroughly researched essays on Black ideas, theories, and intellectuals in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. Global Black Thought publishes historically based contributions by authors in diverse fields of study throughout the humanities and social sciences. While steeped in historical methodologies, Global Black Thought is an interdisciplinary journal informed by scholarship in Africana studies, feminist theory, and critical race theory. The journal welcomes submissions that feature original research and innovative methods. We also extend an invitation to scholars working outside the United States.
Global Black Thought opens new directions for writers interested in understanding the ideas, theories, and ideologies that undergird Black social and political life. The journal encapsulates the best of scholarly research and innovative methods. Essays highlight the wide range of methods and methodologies, including new approaches and diverse and underutilized primary sources–both traditional and unconventional ones. In addition to well-researched, cutting-edge, and deftly argued essays, each issue of the journal features book reviews as well as interviews with influential Black intellectuals whose research is shaping the field. The first issue of the journal (now available on Project Muse), features six original essays, an interview with Dean Pero Dagbovie, and several book reviews.
Click here to Register for the Webinars
Moderator
Dr. Candace Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. 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, which showcased Pearl City, Boca Raton’s oldest neighborhood and its only historically black community. From 2022-23, she published multiple short pieces in Black Perspectives, the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog. Dr. Cunningham is finishing her forthcoming book, “I Hope They Fire Me”: Black Teachers in the Fight for Equal Education, under contract with the University of Georgia Press. It has inspired her next manuscript, “My Salary Increase Was Amazing”: The NAACP and the Teacher Salary Equalization Campaign.
Featured Speakers
Dr. Keisha N. Blain is a professor of history and Africana Studies at Brown University and the founding editor-in-chief of Global Black Thought. She is a Guggenheim, Carnegie, and New America Fellow and a New York Times bestselling author. She has published eight books, including the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018); and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (2021). Her latest book is Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton, September 16, 2025). The book offers a sweeping history of human rights framed by the work and ideas of Black women in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Blain is the founding editor of Global Black Thought.
Dr. Ashley Everson is an Assistant Professor of African-American and Africana Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She recently completed her PhD in Africana Studies at Brown University. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, political theory, labor history, and Black women’s political histories.
Dr. Sabrina Evans is an Assistant Professor of English at Howard University, specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature with a focus on Black women’s writing, archives, and organizing. Her research examines the intellectual thought and literary production of Black clubwomen such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett as well as the networks and communities that helped sustain their intellectual and activist work. She is a JT Mellon Satellite Partner with the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, serving as project co-coordinator for the Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA). BWOA is a digital humanities project that seeks to locate the scattered archives of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black women organizers and create teaching and research resources. In this work, she has collaborated with a team of faculty, graduate students, archivists, and librarians to produce papers locators featuring digitized and nondigitized collections of early Black women organizers as well as a digital map highlighting the various libraries and repositories holding their collections.
Dr. 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 the President of the African American Intellectual History Society, and Managing Editor of Global Black Thought. 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.
Dr. Christy Garrison Harrison is an Assistant Professor of History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Southern University and Agricultural & Mechanical College. She was recently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Garrison-Harrison is completing several projects, including a monograph on Black women’s community activism in Georgia during the modern Civil Rights Movement era and a documentary short about southern Black women activists. At Southern University, she is co-coordinating the launch of new programming in the history department. Forthcoming publications include an abbreviated institutional biographical essay on the history of Southern University and Agricultural & Mechanical College for a project that centers the historical relevance of Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs).
Dr. Joseph Williams is an Assistant Professor of History & Africana Studies at Lehigh University. His research interests lie at the intersection of African American history, women’s and gender history, and US religious history. Prior to joining Lehigh, he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Richards Civil War Era Center and the Africana Research Center at Penn State University. His monograph-in-progress explores Black women’s intellectual activism as they conceptualized the divine and the immaterial to shore up their campaign for racial and gender equality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.