AAIHS OFFICERS

Current Executive Board

President: Robert Greene II

Robert Greene II is an Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University. He is co-editor, along with Tyler D. Parry, of Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Greene II is also a Senior Editor of the award-winning Black Perspectives blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, and Publications Chair for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians. Dr. Greene also serves as the Lead Instructor for the Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights for the South Carolina Progressive Network. He has also written for various publications, including The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, and Oxford American. Currently, Dr. Greene II is working on his book, The Newest South: African Americans and the Democratic Party, 1964-1994, which details how the Southern leaders of the Democratic Party in the post-Civil Rights era crafted strategies to attract, and hold onto, the Black vote across the nation. 

Vice President: Shaun Armstead 

Shaun Armstead is a historian of twentieth-century Black women’s internationalism She earned her PhD in history from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her work considers the affective and interpersonal dimensions of the National Council of Negro Women’s Afro-Asian and Pan-African solidarities. In so doing, she considers how national identity and misperceptions enabled, undermined, and redirected these collaborative worldmaking endeavors distinct from leftist and nationalist iterations of Black internationalism. The Carter G. Woodson Institute for the Study of African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia has supported her research. The American Council of Learned Studies and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars have also endorsed her work. She will spend the 2023-2024 academic year in-residence at Brown University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Africana Studies. She will then join the Department of History at University of California-Santa Barbara as Assistant Professor of History beginning July 2024. 

Secretary: Candace Cunningham

Candace Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. She specializes in African American history, Women and Gender studies, and Public History. Her research is on the 20th century African American experience with a special emphasis on civil rights, education, gender, and the South.  Her 2021 article, “‘Hell is Popping Here in South Carolina’: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era” was published in the History of Education Quarterly. In 2022, she collaborated with the Boca Raton Museum of Art to conduct oral histories and write an essay to accompany the Black Pearls photography exhibit. The exhibit showcased Pearl City, Boca Raton’s oldest neighborhood and its only historically black community. Dr. Cunningham is currently finishing her manuscript on Black teacher activists in the civil rights movement. She is currently working on her manuscript about the role of Black school teachers in the civil rights movement. 

Treasurer: Mickell Carter

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her research interests include Black Internationalism, 20th-Century Social Movements, and the intersections between culture and politics. Her current project examines linkages between Black men’s style during the Black Power Movement, Pan-Africanism, and masculinity. Mickell has worked on several public history projects such as the Bloody Sunday Oral History project where she has interviewed Bloody Sunday Foot Soldiers and document their experiences. Mickell has also co-produced a documentary about the Civil Rights Movement in her hometown, Columbus, GA. She has written for several venues including: the AAIHS’s Black Perspectives, the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project’s Warbler newsletter, the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, and the Washington Post. She is also a host of the New Books Network in African American Studies podcast. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Mickell taught high school social studies in Columbus, GA.

Events Coordinator: DJ Polite

DJ Polite is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy at Augusta University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in American studies from Williams College, a master’s in education from CUNY-Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. in history from the University of South Carolina. Prior work includes teaching special education in a public charter high school, and as a historic guide and interpreter for home museums in South Carolina. His research looks primarily on the mutually reinforcing growth of U.S. Jim Crow policies and empire in the Caribbean, particularly Puerto Rico. It explores the ways that the solidification of both relied on each other and cemented secondary citizenship status for African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and especially women of both groups. He presented at organizations such as the South Carolina Historical Association, the Latin American Section of the Southern Historical Association, the African American Intellectual History Society, the Puerto Rican Studies Association, as well as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He has a chapter in the edited volume Reconstruction and Empire, published by Fordham University Press and has written for online publications such as Black Perspectives, Washington Post, and the Activist History Review. He has taught introductory courses such as Introduction to African American Studies and US History to 1877. His upper level courses have included courses such as Black Internationalism; Race and Diaspora in the Americas; Race and Citizenship in the Americas; and Race & US Empire.