Rate My Professor Jeffrey C. Stewart

Jeffrey C. Stewart is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he joined in 2007 as Chair, serving until 2016, and currently holds the position of Vice-Chancellor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1979. Stewart has devoted his career to studying issues of race and culture as they relate to art, history, literature, music, and philosophy. His landmark biography, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018), received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 2018 PROSE Award for Best Biography/Autobiography, the 2018 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Nonfiction, and the 2019 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Other notable publications include 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History, Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen, the edited collection The New Negro Aesthetic (Penguin Classics, 2022), and Beauty Born of Struggle: The Art of Black Washington (edited, Yale University Press, 2023). In 2024, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to the visual arts.

Stewart's curatorial expertise is evident in exhibitions such as “To Color America: Portraits of Winold Reiss” for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in 1989 and “Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen” for the Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University in 1998, which toured to the National Portrait Gallery, the California Museum of African American History, and the Museum of the City of New York. At UCSB, he advanced key initiatives including the North Hall 1968 Takeover Display in 2015 and Jeffrey’s Jazz Coffeehouse in 2016, an immersive pop-up experience accompanying his History of Jazz course. He has held distinguished fellowships and visiting positions, including Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Rome III, W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University, Lecturer at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France, and appointments at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Tufts, Howard, and George Mason universities.