Our brain trust.
Our jurors.

Our jurors represent the finest scholars in the field of African American history and culture, and are chosen deliberately to reflect a range of institutions of higher learning — from our valued historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to our venerated State Universities, to the esteemed Ivy League.

Dana Williams, PhD (2018-2023)
Professor of African American Literature
Dean of the Graduate School
Howard University

Dana A. Williams is Professor of African American Literature and Interim Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. She has published extensively in African American literature and culture and teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate classes in African American literature and in writing studies. She is a former president of the College Language Association--the largest and oldest organization for faculty of color who teach languages and literature--and a member of the Modern Languages Association Executive Council. A Ford Foundation fellow at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and a John Hope Franklin Humanities Center fellow at Duke University, Williams taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge before returning to her alma mater to teach in the Department of English. Williams is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Grambling State University.

In addition to an annotated bibliography, Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 1999) which she completed as her M.A. thesis at Howard, Dr. Williams has co-edited August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2004) with Dr. Sandra G. Shannon, edited African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), Conversations with Leon Forrest (UP of Mississippi, 2007), and Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays (Ohio State UP, 2009).  She is also the author of the first and only book-length study on Leon Forest, In the Light of Likeness--Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (Ohio State UP, 2005). 

In addition to her book projects, Dr. Williams has published articles in CLA Journal, African American Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, Langston Hughes Review, Zora Neale Hurston Forum, Studies in American Fiction, International Journal of the Humanities, and Profession. 

She is currently completing a definitive intellectual history of Toni Morrison's editorship at Random House Publishing Company with Harper Collins (Amistad). Read more >

William Sturkey, PhD (2021-2023)
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of Pennsylvania

William Sturkey is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Most of his research and teaching focuses on the history of race in the modern American South. He teaches courses on Modern United States History, Southern History, the Civil Rights Movement, America in the 1960s, and his writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Washington Post. His first book, To Write in the Light of Freedom (University Press of Mississippi), is a co-edited collection of newspapers, essays, and poems produced by African American Freedom School students during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. His second book, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Harvard University Press) is a narrative biracial history of the rise-and-fall of Jim Crow in Mississippi.

Charles W. McKinney, Jr., PhD (2021-2023)
Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies
Associate Professor of History
Rhodes College

Charles W. McKinney, Jr. earned his bachelor’s degree in History from Morehouse College. He earned his Ph.D. in African American History and a Graduate Certificate in African and African American Studies from Duke University in 2003. Before arriving at Rhodes, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the African and African American Studies Program. He is a scholar of the African American experience and teaches a wide range of courses on Black life, race, politics, activism and the African American intellectual tradition. His specific area of research is movement building in the Civil Rights/Black Power Era.

McKinney is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (University Press of America, 2010). His second book, co-edited with Aram Goudsouzian, is An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee (University Press of Kentucky, 2018.) Currently, he is working on two projects, the first - under contract with Vanderbilt University Press, and co-edited with Shirletta Kinchen and Francoise Hamlin -  is titled Rights and Lives: An Exploration of the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movements. The second project is tentatively titled George Lee’s World: Race, Power and the (After)life of Segregation. He’s also written essays on Martin Luther King, Jr., Black women in politics, civil rights political activism and Reconstruction. His writing and commentary have appeared in newspapers and information venues across the country, including the Memphis Commercial Appeal, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Black Perspectives, The History Channel, Vanity Fair, and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. He has provided commentary on radio programs across the country and news outlets in the United Kingdom, Europe, China and Australia, and has appeared on CNN. 

In 2009, McKinney served as an Academic Advisor on the National Civil Rights Museum Redesign Team. Since 2016, he has spent summers helping teachers across the nation to craft K-12 civil rights curriculum. In 2018, McKinney was the Inaugural Scholar In Residence at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. Over the years, he has conducted trainings and workshops on movement building and grass-roots activism for union members and organizers in California, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana. Read more >

Courtney R. Baker, PhD (2022-2023)
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of California, Riverside

Courtney R. Baker is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside. In 2017 she co-founded the program in Black Studies at Occidental College and served as its inaugural chair. She earned her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Duke University. Her book, Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (2015) explores the long history of African American visual activism. Her research focuses on blackness, language, and visual representation. Her writing has appeared in The Root, Dilettante Army, Camera Obscura, and the award-winning volume, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights.  IG/Twitter @drprofblacklady

Jesse McCarthy, PhD (2022-2023)
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Jesse McCarthy is Assistant Professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His publications include chapter contributions to Richard Wright in Context, Ralph Ellison in Context, and the Cambridge Companion to the Essay, as well as articles in NOVEL, Transposition, and African American Review. He is editor of the forthcoming Norton Library edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, a collection of essays, and a novel, The Fugitivities.

PAST JURORS

Jarvis R. Givens, PhD (2018-2021)
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education
African & African American Studies (Faculty Affiliate)
2020-21 Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Harvard University

Jarvis R. Givens earned his Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. As an interdisciplinary historian, Givens' research falls at the intersection of the history of American education, 19th and 20th century African American history, and critical theories of race and schooling. Before assuming his position as an assistant professor, Givens was a Dean's Postdoctoral Fellow at HGSE (2016-2018), a Ford Dissertation and Pre-doctoral Fellow, and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Givens' first book, Schooling in Forbidden Fields: Carter G. Woodson and the Demands of Black Education (forthcoming, Harvard University Press), analyzes Carter G. Woodson's (1875-1950) critiques of the American school, the new curricular materials he developed, and how ordinary teachers put his ideas into practice during Jim Crow. The work looks closely at the subversive pedagogy of these educators as well as students’ experiences with Woodson's iconic educational program (Negro History Week, textbooks, classroom decorations, etc.). Givens' historical scholarship has also informed research on contemporary topics of education, specifically looking at the experiences of Black teachers and students in urban schooling. On this front, he is co-editing We Dare Say Love: Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys (forthcoming, Columbia University’s Teachers College Press) with Na'ilah Nasir and Chris Chatmon. This work chronicles the development and implementation of the African American Male Achievement Initiative in Oakland Unified School District, following a small group of Black male educators who changed district policy and practice to create a learning experience for Black boys rooted in love. Givens has published in journals such as: Race Ethnicity and Education, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Harvard Educational Review, and more. He is a life member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and a contributor to Black Perspectives (blog of the African American Intellectual History Society).

Givens' emerging research is developing in two distinct directions. The first centers on interrogating silences in the archives of Black educational history and exploring possibilities for expanding this archive by building on new approaches in digital humanities. Secondly, he is exploring lessons to be gleaned from the history of Black teacher associations in support of contemporary efforts to recruit and retain African American educators. Read more >

Leigh Raiford, PhD (2019-2021)
Associate Professor
African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Leigh Raiford is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches and researches about race, gender, justice and visuality. She also serves as affiliate faculty in the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Raiford received her PhD from Yale University’s joint program in African American Studies and American Studies in 2003. Before arriving at UC-Berkeley in 2004, she was the Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, Volkswagen Foundation (Germany), the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson foundation, and the Hellman Family Foundation and has also been a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize.  She is co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2017) and with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals, including American Quarterly, Small Axe, Qui Parle, History and Theory, English Language Notes and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art; as well as popular venues including Artforum, Aperture, Ms. Magazine, Atlantic.com and Al- Jazeera.com.  Raiford’s essays have also been included in the collections Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture After 1945, edited by Sara Blair, Joseph Entin and Franny Nudelman; Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, (Harry N. Abrams Press, 2003), a history of race and photography in the United States edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis; and Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, (Duke, 2012), edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith.

Raiford has written essays about the work of a number of contemporary Black artists, including Lava Thomas, Mildred Howard, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Dawoud Bey. In 2019, she co-curated the group shows Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (with Essence Harden) and About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. Read more >

Allyson Hobbs, PhD (2018)
Associate Professor of United States History Director
African and African American Studies
Stanford University

Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor of United States History, the Director of African and African American Studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.com and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.  Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Root.com, The Guardian, Politico, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC and National Public Radio. In 2017, she was honored by the Silicon Valley chapter of the NAACP with a Freedom Fighter Award. She served on the jury for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. The book was also selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014, a “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014” by The Root, a featured book in the New York Times Book Review Paperback Row in 2016, and a Paris Review “What Our Writers are Reading This Summer” Selection in 2017.

Allyson is currently at work on two books, both forthcoming from Penguin Press. Nowhere to Run: African American Travel in Twentieth Century Americaexplores the violence, humiliation, and indignities that African American motorists experienced on the road and To Tell the Terrible, which examines Black women’s testimonies against and collective memory of sexual violence.