Global Black Thought: A New Academic Journal
The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) is excited to announce the launch of GLOBAL BLACK THOUGHT, a new academic journal published by the University of Pennsylvania Press!
GLOBAL BLACK THOUGHT, the official journal of AAIHS, is devoted to the study of the Black intellectual tradition. The journal publishes original, innovative, and thoroughly researched essays on Black ideas, theories, and intellectuals in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. GLOBAL BLACK THOUGHT will feature historically based contributions by authors in diverse fields of study throughout the humanities and social sciences.
While steeped in historical methodologies, GLOBAL BLACK THOUGHT is an interdisciplinary journal informed by scholarship in Africana studies, feminist theory, and critical race theory. The journal welcomes submissions that feature original research and innovative methods. We also extend an invitation to scholars working outside the United States.
Editor-in-Chief
Keisha N. Blain, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow, is an award-winning historian of the 20th century United States with broad interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She completed a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and is now a Full Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University and a columnist for MSNBC. Blain is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018. The book won the 2018 First Book Award from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the 2019 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians. Blain’s second book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, was published by Beacon Press in 2021. The book was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and selected as a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also selected as one of the best history books by Smithsonian Magazine in 2021. Blain has also published five edited volumes, including the #1 New York Times Best Seller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited with Ibram X. Kendi. Her next book, A Global Struggle: How Black Women Led the Fight for Human Rights, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2025.
Managing Editor
Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history in the Department of Humanities at Claflin University and the current president of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). He serves as book reviews editor and blogger for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians as well as Chief Instructor for the South Carolina Progressive Network’s Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights. Along with Tyler D. Parry, Dr. Greene is the co-editor of Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2021). He is also working on his first solo-authored book (Penn Press), examining the role of Southern African Americans in the Democratic Party from 1964 through the 1990s. Finally, Dr. Greene has published several articles and book chapters on the intersection of memory, politics, and African American history, and has written for numerous popular publications, including The Nation, Oxford American, Dissent, Scalawag, Jacobin, In These Times, Politico, and The Washington Post.
Associate Editors
Leslie Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is a specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, focusing on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Black culture, political consciousness, and resistance movements. Her first book, African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 (University of Illinois Press, 2008), explores Black culture, identity, and political activism during the early national and antebellum eras. Her second book, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2022), examines how Haiti’s rise as the first Black sovereign nation in the western hemisphere inspired Black political activism in the United States during the nineteenth century, especially in the realm of foreign policy. Specifically, it charts the long history of U.S. foreign policy towards Haiti from 1804 to the present and reveals how the struggle for Haitian sovereignty inspired U.S. Black activists to develop a transnational political consciousness and to shape U.S. foreign policy towards African diasporic nations. She is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship. She is the past President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and an Executive Council member of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS). She also serves on the Advisory Councils for the Journal of African American History, The Black Scholar, and the International Journal for Africana Studies.
Kabria Baumgartner is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, specializing in the history of education, African American women’s and gender history, and New England studies. She is the author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, which tells the story of Black girls and women who fought for their educational rights in the nineteenth-century United States. Her book has won four prizes, including the prestigious 2021 American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award. She is the recipient of Diverse magazine’s 2020 Emerging Scholar Award. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and most recently the American Antiquarian Society, where she holds the 2022-23 AAS-NEH Long-Term Fellowship. She has published eleven scholarly articles and book chapters, and her public writing has been featured in the Washington Post, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and Historic New England Magazine. Strongly committed to public history, she frequently collaborates with historical organizations such as the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire on community-engaged histories. She co-curated an historical exhibit on the nineteenth-century youth-led equal school rights movement, “Let None Be Excluded,” which is on view through April 2024 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. She is completing her second book, Radical Black Excellence: How Black Youth Shaped the Fight for Civil Rights in Boston, which explores Black youth activism and civil rights in nineteenth-century Boston.
Reighan Gillam is an ethnographer of Black visual culture. She is an associate professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines media at the intersection of racial ideologies, anti-racism, and protest. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that Afro-Brazilian media producers create images that render Black subjects and their experiences in complex ways. Her first book, Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media was published in March 2022 from the University of Illinois Press. She earned a BA in Anthropology and Afro-American and African Studies from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Cornell University. Gillam’s next research project takes a transnational approach to the study of Black politics and culture. Her second book, entitled Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism examines how Afro-Brazilians engage African American people, culture, and performance. Gillam served as the Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She was elected to the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association.
Tiffany N. Florvil is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She is a 20th century cultural historian of Germany whose work focuses on African/Black diasporic communities, internationalism, race, gender, and sexuality. Her work centers on Black Germans and their creation of new intellectual, cultural, and political practices. She is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and essays and three books, most recently, Black Germany-Schwarz, deutsch, feministisch-die Geschichte einer Bewegung (Ch. Links Verlag, 2023), a German translation, and Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies 2020 Book Prize, among other honors. She has received support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the American Academy in Berlin, and others. She is now working on a manuscript about the life of May Ayim, among the most important Black German thinkers and writers of her generation. She examines the international intellectuals in Ayim’s orbit, including the British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, the South African feminist Ellen Kuzwayo, and the British publisher John La Rose. Florvil argues that these relationships moved beyond bloodlines, allowing us to better understand the contours of racial intimacy and radical kinship. Analyzing these relationships, she also reveals how Ayim’s internationalism manifested itself in the everyday exchanges and practices that she maintained with her community in and beyond Berlin.
Benjamin Talton is the Director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. He is an historian who researches and writes about culture and politics in Africa and the African diaspora. He earned his BA in history at Howard University and his doctorate, also in history, at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Howard, Dr. Talton was Professor of History at Temple University. He has also taught African History at Hofstra University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. A highly respected author, Dr. Talton has published three books: The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality (Palgrave, 2010); Black Subjects in Africa and its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (Palgrave 2011), which he co-edited with Dr. Quincy Mills of the University of Maryland; and, most recently, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Penn Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association. Among his current projects is co-editing Volume III of the Cambridge History of the African Diaspora, with Monique Bedasse and Nemata Blyden, and chief editor of all three of the series’ volumes, Michael Gomez. Dr. Talton is a past president of the Ghana Studies Association and a former member of the executive board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).
Book Review Editor
Bright Gyamfi is an assistant professor of history at the University of California San Diego and a former Presidential Fellow at Northwestern University. His research sits at the intersection of West African and African Diaspora intellectual history, nationalism, gender, Pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, and economic development. He writes on African intellectuals who worked to transform and radicalize the study of Africa in academic and intellectual centers around the Atlantic. He has received research fellowships and grants from several organizations and institutions, including the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-IIE, the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program, Northwestern University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Notre Dame. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, African Studies Review, Africa is a Country, and The Conversation. His book manuscript, “Embers of Pan-Africanism: Nkrumahist Intellectuals and Decolonization 1960-1980” examines why and how radical ideas emerge and how they change over time. Moreover, it explores how insurgent ideas are sustained after the collapse of a radical government.
Editorial Assistant
Ashley Everson is a PhD candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Ashley earned her B.A. with honors distinction in Social Thought and Political Economy and her M.A. in Political Science with a graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, political theory, labor history, and Black women’s political histories. Her most recent research seeks to investigate the relationship between Black political mobilization in the Tennessee Valley region and decolonial organizing throughout the African Diaspora during the interwar period.
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