The HistoryMakers 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African American Political History
Faculty
Dr. Eric Arnesen, Professor of
History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Eric Arnesen, professor of history at the George
Washington University, specializes in race, labor,
and civil rights. He is author of Brotherhoods of
Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for
Equality (2001), Waterfront Workers of New
Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923
(1991), and Black Protest and the Great Migration:
A Brief History with Documents (2002), and is
editor or coeditor of four other books. A regular
contributor to the Chicago Tribune, he received
the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary
Criticism. He is currently writing a biography of
civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Arnesen@gwu.edu
Dr. Chris Benson, Associate
Professor, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Christopher Benson is an Associate Professor of
African American Studies, and Journalism at the
University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. He
earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in journalism at
the University of Illinois and his J.D. at
Georgetown University. He has worked as a city
hall reporter in Chicago for an area radio
station, and as Features Editor and Washington
Editor for Ebony magazine. He also has written for
Chicago, Savoy, Jet, and Crisis magazines, and he
has contributed to The Washington Post, the
Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and
Reader’s Digest. Benson is co-author with Mamie
Till-Mobley of her memoir Death of Innocence: The
Hate Crime That Changed America, (Random House,
October 2003) the Essence bestseller about the
life and death of Mrs. Mobley’s son, Emmett Till,
and the history-making changes that followed. At
the University of Illinois, Chris teaches African
American Studies courses on hate crimes and on
race and the press. In Journalism, he also teaches
magazine writing, with an emphasis on literary
techniques. cdbenson@illinois.edu
Mr. Leon Dash, Professor of
Journalism, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Leon Dash is a professor of journalism at the
University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. A
former reporter for the Washington Post, he is the
author of Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in
Urban America, which grew out of the eight-part
Washington Post series for which he won the
Pulitzer Prize. He received an Emmy Award in 1996
from the National Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences for a documentary series in the public
affairs category of hard issues. In 1998 Dash
joined the University of Illinois as a professor
of Journalism. He was later named the Swanlund
Chair Professor of Journalism, Law, and
Afro-American Studies in 2000. Three years later
he was made a permanent faculty member in the
University's Center for Advanced Study. Most
recently, Professor Dash was appointed Director of
the Center for Advanced Study in the 2009 Fall
semester. leondash@illinois.edu
Dr. Bruce Laurie, Senior
Lecturer, University of Warwick
Professor Laurie is editor (with Milton Cantor) of
Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker (1977), and
author of Working People of Philadelphia,
1800-1850 (1980) and Artisans into Workers: Labor
in Nineteenth Century America (1989), which has
just been re-issued by the University of Illinois
Press. He has edited several important series in
labor history and is on the editorial board of
Labor History and Social Science History. He has
held fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, and has
taught as Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the
Study of Social History, University of Warwick.
Professor Laurie retired in Spring, 2008, but is
still teaching courses. He is the author of Beyond
Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. laurie@history.umass.edu
Professor Adolph Reed, Jr.,
Professor of Political Science, University of
Pennsylvania
Adolph Reed, Jr. is a Political Science professor
at the University of Pennsylvania. His research
areas of interest include American and African
American politics and political thought, urban
politics and American politica development. Reed
previously taught at Yale, Northwestern and the
New School for Social Research. He has published
seven books, the most recent titled Renewing
Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and
Material Foundations of African American Thought reedal@sas.upenn.edu
Dr. Josh Radinsky Assistant
Professor of the Learning Sciences, University
of Illinois at Chicago
Professor Radinsky is an Assistant Professor of
the Learning Sciences and Curriculum Studies at
the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of
Education. His research and teaching focus on how
people learn with graphic and geographic data,
including history and science inquiry with tools
like geographic information systems (GIS). joshuar@uic.edu
Dr. Christopher Reed,
Professor Emeritus of History, Roosevelt
University
Dr. Reed is Professor Emeritus of History at
Roosevelt University in Chicago. In his book, Black
Chicago's First Century, Reed provides the
first comprehensive study of the first one hundred
years of African American settlement and
achievements in the Windy City. Other publications
include All The World is Here: The Black
Presence At White City as well as The
Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional
Leadership 1910-1966.He is also an expert on
post-Civil Rights Movement black politics. creed@roosevelt.edu
Dr. Michael Dawson, Professor
of Political Science, University of Chicago
Michael C. Dawson is the John D. MacArthur
Distinguished Service Professor of Political
Science and the College at the University of
Chicago, as well as the founding and current
Director of the Center for the Study of Race,
Politics, and Culture at the university. He has
also taught at the University of Michigan and
Harvard University. Dawson received his BA with
High Honors from Berkeley in 1982 and doctorate
degree from Harvard University in 1986. Professor
Dawson was co-principal investigator of the 1988
National Black Election Study and principal
investigator with Ronald Brown of the 1993-1994
National Black Politics Study. His newest book, Not
In Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics,
will be published in the fall of 2011 by the
University of Chicago Press. His previous two
books, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in
African-American Politics (Princeton 1994)
and Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary
African-American Political Ideologies
(Chicago 2001), won multiple awards including
Black Visions winning the prestigious Ralph Bunche
Award from the American Political Science
Association
Dr. Cheryl Greenberg,
Professor of History, Trinity College
Professor Greenberg has taught at Trinity for most
of her career, with a few brief stints elsewhere
(University of Helsinki, Columbia, Harvard) and
finds a great deal of satisfaction being at a
liberal arts college. Trinity offers excellent
students, the resources to create interesting and
rich courses, and colleagues from many other
departments and programs with whom she works
across disciplinary boundaries. Professor
Greenberg teaches courses in African American
history, the history of race in the U.S., and the
interplay of race and ethnicity, as well as
courses in recent US history. Professor
Greenberg's research interests are equally varied,
ranging from African American communities during
the Great Depression to grass-roots organizing in
the Civil Rights movement, and from race riots to
Black-Jewish relations. Her current long-term
projects include one on intermarriage and group
identity and another on the invisible cultural
assumptions of middle-class work places and
universities.
Dr. Charles Payne, Professor of Sociology,
University of Chicago
Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon
Distinguished Service Professor in the School of
Social Service Administration at the University of
Chicago and Steering Committee member for the
Consortium on Chicago School Research at the Urban
Education Institute. His interests include urban
education and school reform, social inequality,
social change and modern African American history.
His most recent books are So Much Reform, So
Little Change (Harvard Education Publishing Group,
2008) which examines the persistence of failure in
urban schools, and an anthology, Teach
Freedom: The African American Tradition of
Education For Liberation (Teachers College Press,
2008), which is concerned with Freedom School-like
education. He is the author of Getting
What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and
Failure In Urban Education (1984)
and I've Got the Light of Freedom: The
Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil
Rights Movement (1995). The latter has won
awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice Magazine,
the Simon Wisenthal Center and the Gustavus Myers
Center for the Study of Human Rights in North
America. He is co-author of Debating the
Civil Rights Movement (1999) and
co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A
Century of African American Activism,
1850-1950 (2003).
Payne holds a bachelor's degree in Afro-American
studies from Syracuse University and a doctorate
in sociology from Northwestern.
Dr. Rhonda Williams, Associate
Professor of History, Case Western University
Rhonda Y. Williams is an associate professor of
History in the College of Arts and Sciences and
founding director of the Social Justice Institute
at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Williams
also initiated and directs CWRU's Postdoctoral
Fellowship in African American Studies. Dr.
Williams is the author of the award-winning The
Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's
Struggles Against Urban Inequality (2004),
the inaugural book in Oxford University Press's Transgressing
Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black
Communities book series. Williams is also
the author of several articles including "Black
Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black
Power" in The Black Power Movement:Rethinking
the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, and "
'Something's Wrong Down Here': Poor Black Women
and Urban Struggles for Democracy" in African
American Urban History Since World War II.
She is the co-editor of two volumes - Women,
Transnationalism, and Human Rights, a
Special Issue of the Radical History Review
101, Spring 2008, and Teaching the
American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom's
Bittersweet Song (New York: Routledge,
2002).
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