People

Daniel E. Agbiboa

danielagbiboa@fas.harvard.edu

John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Center for Cities...

Emmanuel K. Akyeampong

akyeamp@fas.harvard.edu

Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies;

Professor Akyeampong joined the History faculty at Harvard upon receiving his Ph.D. in African History from the University of Virginia in 1993. He received his master's degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in 1989, where he concentrated on...

Paulina L. Alberto

Professor of African and African American Studies and of History

On Sabbatical Fall 2026-Spring 2027

Director of Graduate Studies

Office Hours: Sign-Up Available via Canvas. Paulina L. Alberto is a historian of Afro-Latin American lives, thought, and politics as they unfolded in the aftermath of slavery, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. Her work explores the intersections of...

Ali S. Asani

aliasani@fas.harvard.edu

Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies

Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures

On Leave

Professor Asani holds a joint appointment between NELC and the Study of Religion. He also serves on the faculty of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. He has taught at Harvard since 1983, offering instruction in a variety of languages such as...

George Aumoithe

gaumoithe@fas.harvard.edu

Assistant Professor of History and of African and African American Studies

Office Hours: On Zoom by appointment, typically Thursdays at 3 PM George Aumoithe, BA (Bowdoin), MA, MPhil, PhD (Columbia), RYT-200 (Yoga Alliance), is a scholar-artist and historian of the 20th century United States. Professor Aumoithe joins Harvard as a...

Robin Bernstein

rbernst@fas.harvard.edu

Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Director of the Program in American Studies

On Leave 2025-2026

I am a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. racial formation from the nineteenth century to the present. A graduate of Yale's doctoral program American Studies and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, I am the Dillon Professor of...

Suzanne P. Blier

blier@fas.harvard.edu

Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts

Professor of African and African American Studies

On Leave 2025-2026

Suzanne Preston Blier (Ph.D. 1981 Columbia, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University) is an historian of African art and architecture in both the History of Art and Architecture and...

Lawrence D. Bobo

lawrence_bobo@harvard.edu

Dean of Social Science

W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences

On Leave 2025-2026

Lawrence D. Bobo is the Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He holds appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of African and African American Studies. His research...

Vincent Brown

brown8@fas.harvard.edu

Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies

Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African-American Studies and is the Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative...

Glenda R. Carpio

carpio@fas.harvard.edu

Powell M. Cabot Professor of English and Professor of African and African American Studies

Glenda R. Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. Her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. She is currently working on a...

Bruno Carvalho

bcarvalh@fas.harvard.edu

Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies

Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative

Affiliated Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design

Bruno Carvalho works on cities as lived and imagined spaces. He studies relationships between cultural practices and urbanization, with a focus on Brazil. Carvalho’s interdisciplinary approaches bridge history, literary analysis, and urban studies. Often...

Sidney Chalhoub

chalhoub@fas.harvard.edu

David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies

Chair, Department of History

Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

On Leave 2025-2026

Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. A social historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil, his first monograph, Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), is a...

Myisha S. Eatmon

Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of History

Dr. Myisha S. Eatmon is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies and History at Harvard University, where she has served since 2022. A Chapel Hill, North Carolina native, she specializes in examining how marginalized...

Caroline Elkins

elkins@fas.harvard.edu

Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies

Professor Elkins's first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was also selected as one of the Economist's best history books for 2005, was a New York Times...

Marla F. Frederick

hdsdeansoffice@hds.harvard.edu

Professor of Religion and Culture

Dean of the Faculty of Divinity

Marla Frederick is a leading ethnographer and scholar focused on the African American religious experience. She became the eighteenth Dean of Harvard Divinity School on January 1, 2024. Frederick employs an interdisciplinary approach to examining the ways...

Alejandro de la Fuente

delafuente@fas.harvard.edu

Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics;

Professor of African and African American Studies and of History;

Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Professor de la Fuente’s works on race, slavery, law, art, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese...

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

gates@harvard.edu

Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor

Director, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research

On Leave 2025-2026

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic...

Claudine Gay

Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies

On Leave

Claudine Gay is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and Professor of African and African-American Studies. She served as the 30th president of Harvard University, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the dean of...

Jarvis R. Givens

jarvis_givens@gse.harvard.edu

Professor of Education

Professor of African and African-American Studies

Jarvis R. Givens is a Professor of Education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and he is also the co-founding faculty director of the Black Teacher Archive. As a historian who focuses on 19th and 20th-century African American...

David Glovsky

Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies

David (Dave) Glovsky is a historian of 19th and 20th century West Africa, with a focus on Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and the Gambia. His research and teaching interests include histories of mobility and migration, borderlands, spatial history, Islam...

Evelynn M. Hammonds

hammonds@fas.harvard.edu

Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies

Chair of the Department of the History of Science

Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Professor Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies. Professor Hammonds joined the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2002 after teaching at the Massachusetts...

Amber M. Henry

ahenry@fas.harvard.edu

Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies

Faculty Affiliate of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI)

Amber M. Henry is an anthropologist of Latin America and the Caribbean whose work explores political mobilization and embodied practices in relation to sovereign forms of Black placemaking. Professor Henry’s first book centers on the Afro-Colombian...

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

ebhiggin@fas.harvard.edu

Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She held the position of chair of the Department of African and African American Studies from 2006-2013. In summer...

Jennifer L. Hochschild

hochschild@gov.harvard.edu

Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies

Member of the Faculty of Education; Harvard College Professor; Member of the Faculty at the John F. Kennedy School of Government

Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor. In 2011, she held the John W. Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the...

Tracey E. Hucks

thucks@hds.harvard.edu

Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies

Suzanne Young Murray Professor (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study)

Tracey Hucks is a nationally known and esteemed scholar of Africana Studies and American Religious History. She has served most recently as Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Colgate University where she has been James A. Storing Professor of Religion and...

Vijay Iyer

vijayiyer@fas.harvard.edu

Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts

Graduate Advisor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry (CPCI)

Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” VIJAY IYER has carved out a unique path as a prolific, shape-shifting presence in American music...

Walter Johnson

johnson2@fas.harvard.edu

Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies

Walter Johnson's work focuses on slavery, capitalism, and, increasingly, imperialism in the nineteenth century. His first book, Soul by Soul (1999) used the slave market as a way to think about the fantasies, fears, negotiations, and violence that...

Terrence L. Johnson

tjohnson@hds.harvard.edu

Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies

Terrence L. Johnson is Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies. His research interests include African American political thought, ethics, American religions, and the role of religion in public life. Johnson's interdisciplinary...

Michèle Lamont

mlamont@wjh.harvard.edu

Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Professor of Sociology, and Professor of African and African American Studies

Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. Born in 1957, she grew up in Quebec and studied political theory at the University of...

Sarah Lewis

sarahlewis@fas.harvard.edu

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies

Sarah Lewis is an art and cultural historian. She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice, a catalytic civic...

Jesse McCarthy

jessemccarthy@fas.harvard.edu

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Education: Ph.D. in English, Princeton University 2018 M.A. in English, Princeton University 2013 B.A. English, Amherst College 2006 Interests: the novel, African American literature, African diaspora literatures, postwar or post-45 literary history...

John M. Mugane

mugane@fas.harvard.edu

Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures and Director of the African Language Program

John M. Mugane is the Director of the African Language program in the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a linguist specializing in African languages and is the Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures at Harvard...

Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies

Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Previously, he was a Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in...

Jacob Olupona

olupona@fas.harvard.edu

Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of African Religious Traditions

Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies

Jacob K. Olupona is Professor of African Religious Traditions, Harvard Divinity School and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He studied at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Boston University where...

Imani Perry

Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies

Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute

On Leave 2025-2026

Professor Imani Perry is appointed jointly as Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and in African and African American Studies. She is scheduled to teach a course on Black feminist theory in fall 2023 and the WGS Junior Tutorial in Spring...

Tommie Shelby

tshelby@fas.harvard.edu

Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy

On Leave 2025-2026

Interests: Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, social theory, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Tommie Shelby is Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and Caldwell Titcomb...

Doris Sommer

dsommer@fas.harvard.edu

Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies

Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University

Professor Sommer's research interests have developed from the 19th-Century novels that helped to consolidate new republics in Latin America through the particular aesthetics of minoritarian literature, including bilingual virtuosity, to her current more...

John Stauffer

stauffer@fas.harvard.edu

Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies

On Leave 2025-2026

JOHN STAUFFER is the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of 20 books and over 100 articles, which mostly focus on antislavery, social protest...

Brandon Terry

bterry@fas.harvard.edu

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences

Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Born...

David R. Williams

dwilliam@hsph.harvard.edu

Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in the School of Public Health and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

David R. Williams is the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health. He is also a Professor of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Harvard University. Previously, he served 6 years on the faculty of Yale...