Mia Bay
Fellow, Race and Ethnicity, Rutgers University
Mia Bay is a historian who teaches at Rutgers University, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. The author of a number of works, including The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People 1830-1925 (2000), she has recently completed a new book entitled To Trouble the Waters Freely: The Life and Times of Ida B. Wells (2009).
Mia Bay
Associate Director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity, Rutgers University
Mia Bay is a historian who teaches at Rutgers University, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. The author of a number of works, including The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People 1830-1925 (2000), she has recently completed a new book entitled To Trouble the Waters Freely: The Life and Times of Ida B. Wells (2009).
Working Group Affiliation
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Project Director
Farah Griffin
Professor, Department of English & Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University
Professor Griffin's major fields of interest are American and African American literature, music, history and politics. The recipient of numerous honors and awards for her teaching and scholarship, in 2006-2007 Professor Griffin was a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008), among others.
Farah Griffin
William B. Ransford Professor of English & Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University
Professor Griffin's major fields of interest are American and African American literature, music, history and politics. The recipient of numerous honors and awards for her teaching and scholarship, in 2006-2007 Professor Griffin was a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Perseus Books, 2013). She is also the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999) co-editor, with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998) and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O'Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004).
Working Group Affiliation
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Project Director
Martha S. Jones
Fellow, Law, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Martha S. Jones is Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican Studies, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University (2001) and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law (1987). She currently serves as a 2008 Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the National Constitution Center.
Martha S. Jones
Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican Studies, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Martha S. Jones is Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican Studies, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University (2001) and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law (1987). She currently serves as a 2008 Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the National Constitution Center.
Jones has been a fellow with the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, a recipient of the AHA Littleton-Griswold research grant (2002), and a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris (2006 and 2007). She directs the Law and Slavery and Freedom Project, an international research collaborative with Rebecca J. Scott (Michigan) and Jean Hébrard (EHESS) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Women's History. Jones is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (2007), which examines nineteenth-century debates over the rights of women. Her current work includes two book projects: Overturning Dred Scott: Everyday Life at the Intersection of Race and Law in an Antebellum City and Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: One Household's Journey Through the Law of Slavery and Freedom, a comparative study of slavery and law in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century French Caribbean and United States.
Working Group Affiliation
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Project Director
Barbara D. Savage
Fellow, History, University of Pennsylvania
Barbara D. Savage is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1995. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in twentieth century African American history; the history of American religious and social reform movements; and the history of the relationship between media and politics.
Barbara D. Savage
Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
Barbara D. Savage is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1995. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in twentieth century African American history; the history of American religious and social reform movements; and the history of the relationship between media and politics.
She is the author of Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Award for the best book in American history in the period 1916-1966. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), a collection of new work from scholars associated with a three-year Ford Funded project coordinated with Professor R. Marie Griffith at Princeton University.
Her most recent book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press, 2008), is an historical examination of debates about the public responsibility of black churches and the role of religion in racial leadership. Savage has published several articles related to that project, including "Biblical and Historical Imperatives: Toward a History of Ideas about the Political Role of Black Churches," in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed., Vincent Wimbush (New York: Continuum Press, 2000) and "W. E. B. Du Bois and 'the Negro Church,'" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March, 2000).
She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Smithsonian Institution for work on her first book. She also has received fellowship awards for work on her current project from: the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University; the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion; and the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center on Black Culture.
Savage received her doctorate in history from Yale in 1995, and also holds a law degree from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia. Prior to entering graduate school, she worked in Washington, DC, as a Congressional staff member and as a member of the staff of the Children's Defense Fund. During graduate school, she served as Director of Federal Relations, Office of the General Counsel at Yale University.
At Penn, among other University commitments, she served as a member of the recent Presidential Search Committee. She also is a faculty member for the National Endowment for the Humanities College and University Teachers' Institute on the Civil Rights Movement, held during the summers at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.
Working Group Affiliation
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Project Director