Adam Lee Cilli

Adam Lee Cilli, Ph.D. earned his doctorate in history at the University of Maine in 2016 and currently serves as an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.  He is the author of Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945 (University of Georgia Press, 2021).  This book illuminates the social justice efforts of journalists, scholars, social workers, medical experts, lawyers, and other professionals who navigated the fraught racial landscape of the urban North during the first phase of the Great Migration. Upending traditional depictions of Black reform work that stress its essential ties to racial uplift ideology, Canaan, Dim and Far shows how reformers experimented with a variety of strategies as they moved fluidly across ideologies and political alliances to find practical solutions to profound inequities. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Urban History, and Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Follow him on Twitter @LeeCilli.