Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies & the Economy

Dr. Leslie Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College (CT). He is the author of Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life and co-editor (with Minkah Makalani) of the essay collection, Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem. Baldwin is currently writing Land of Darkness: Chicago and the Making of Race in Modern America (Oxford UP) and “UniverCities: How Higher Education is Transforming Urban America.” He also serves on the Executive Board of the Urban History Association and the Editorial Board for the Journal of Urban History. 

Michael A. Gomez is currently professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, having served as the director of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) from its inception in 2000 to 2007, and is currently series editor of the Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora, Cambridge University Press.  He has also served as chair of the History departments at both NYU and Spelman College, and served as President of UNESCO's International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route Project from 2009 to 2011.  His first book, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad:  The Precolonial State of Bundu  (Cambridge University Press, 1992), examines a Muslim polity in what is now eastern Senegal.  The next publication, Exchanging Our Country Marks:  The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), is concerned with questions of culture and race as they were informed by the African presence and experience.  Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2005) is primarily aimed at an undergraduate audience, and is more fully involved with the idea of an African diaspora, as is Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York University Press, 2006), an edited volume that spans time and space in investigating a variety of themes and issues.  Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2005), continues with the study of the African diaspora by looking at the ways in which African Muslims negotiated their bondage and freedom throughout the Americas, but in a way that allows for significant integration of Islamic Africa.  Primarily a cultural and social historian of both Africa and its diaspora, Gomez is completing a book on the history of early and medieval West Africa, African Dominion: Early and Medieval Savannah and Sahel, upon whose completion he will turn to a comprehensive study of the African diaspora.  Invested in an Arabic manuscript project disrupted by war (in Mali), arguably one of the most important endeavors of its kind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Gomez remains supportive of the struggles of people of African descent worldwide.

Emma Hart is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews.  She gained her undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford and her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University.  She is an early American urban historian and the author of Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World.  She is currently writing a history of the early American marketplace and its role in the development of American capitalism, as well as continuing her work in urban history through an international research network investigating the links between cities and globalization.  

Benjamin Houston is Senior Lecturer of US history at Newcastle University (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK).  He is author of an award-winning monograph on civil rights in Nashville, Tennessee, entitled The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City.  Previously he directed the Remembering African American Pittsburgh (RAP) oral history project at Carnegie Mellon University.  He teaches post World War II U.S. history, the civil rights movement and the black freedom struggle, and oral history.  

Brian Kelly is one of three historians in the School specializing in the US South. A labour historian with a special interest in race and class relations in the post-Civil War South, his early work explored the record of interracial cooperation between black and white workers in industrial Birmingham, Alabama. His first book, Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (Illinois, 2001), won a number of awards, including the Southern Historical Association’s H. L. Mitchell Prize for an outstanding book in Southern working-class history and its Frances Butler Simkins Award for the best first book by an author in Southern history. In the years since he has published widely on the problem of racial antagonism and its impact on working-class politics in the US, with studies that range from labour abolition in the antebellum period through to the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, during which the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Formerly a Walter Hines Page Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, he has held non-residential fellowships at the Institute for Southern Studies (University of South Carolina) and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute (Harvard University). 

He was the recipient of a student-nominated QUB Teaching Award in 2013, and in 2015 was nominated for “Most Inspiring Teaching Staff” in the QUB Student Union Education Awards. 

Earl Lewis became the sixth President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in March 2013.  Under his guidance, the Foundation has reaffirmed its commitment to the humanities, the arts, and higher education by emphasizing the importance of continuity and change.

A noted social historian, Mr. Lewis has held faculty appointments at the University of California at Berkeley (1984–89), and the University of Michigan (1989–2004).  He has championed the importance of diversifying the academy, enhancing graduate education, re-visioning the liberal arts, exploring the role of digital tools for learning, and connecting universities to their communities.

Prior to joining The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mr. Lewis served as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University. As Provost, Lewis led academic affairs and academic priority setting for the university.

He is the author and co-editor of seven books, including The African American Urban Experience:  Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (with Joe William Trotter and Tera W. Hunter, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Defending Diversity: Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan (with Jeffrey S. Lehman and Patricia Gurin, University of Michigan Press, 2004); Love on Trial:  An American Scandal in Black and White (with Heidi Ardizzone, WW Norton, 2001); the award-winning To Make Our World Anew:  A History of African Americans (with Robin D.G. Kelley, Oxford University Press, 2000); In Their Own Interests:  Race, Class and Power in 20th Century Norfolk (University of California Press, 1991); as well as the 11-volume The Young Oxford History of African Americans (with Robin D.G. Kelley, Oxford University Press, 1995–1997); and the award-winning book series American Crossroads (University of California Press).

A native of Tidewater, Virginia, Mr. Lewis earned an undergraduate degree in history and psychology from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota.  He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008.

In 2015, Mr. Lewis was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Rutgers University-Newark and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Dartmouth College; he also received an honorary Doctor of Humanities from Concordia College in 2002; Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota in 2001; and the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award from the University of Michigan in 1999. 

Ralph Proctor received a B,S in Psychology and a PH.D in History from the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Proctor is the former Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer of theDiversity and Inclusion Office at CCAC.  He is presently the professor of Ethnic and Diversity Studies and an Academic Advisor. He is a former Assistant Dean of The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and held a joint-appointment in the History Department.  Professor Proctor is a nationally-recognized collector of an expert on African Art and have traveled extensively in Africa.  He was the first Black Producer/Host of BLACK HORIZONS on WQED TV; former host/producer of BLACK TALK on WCXJ radio; former host/producer of FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE on WPGH TV and Community Forum on WYJZ radio and NAACP ON THE LINE on WAMO radio.  He has taught African Art, African American History, African American Anthropology, Cultural studies, and Multicultural Studies at PITT, Carlow, Chatham, LAroche, and Duquense University.  He is a United States Army veteran and a veteran of the Southern and Pittsburgh civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Rhonda Y. Williams, an associate professor of History at CWRU, completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rhonda, as many call her, is the founder and director of the Social Justice Institute at CWRU; the founder and director of CWRU’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Studies; and the author of two books; Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20^th Century (2015) and the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004). The co-editor of the Justice, Power, and Politics book series with University of North Carolina Press, Dr. Rhonda is the author of numerous articles and book chapters. These include “The Pursuit of Audacious Power: Rebel Reformers and Neighborhood Politics in Baltimore, 1966-1968,” in Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level; “‘To Challenge the Status Quo by Any Means’: Community Action and Representational Politics in 1960s Baltimore,” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History; and  “ ‘Something’s wrong down here’: Low-Income Black Women and Urban Struggles for Democracy,” in African American Urban History Since World War II.  She is also the co-editor of Women, Transnationalism, and Human Rights, a Special Issue of the Radical History Review (2008) and Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement (2002).