Keisha Blain

Keisha N. Blain is Professor of History and Africana Studies at Brown University, with affiliated faculty appointments in American Studies and the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. She earned a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2014, an M.A. from Princeton in 2011, and a B.A. from Binghamton University, State University of New York, in 2008. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow, Blain is an award-winning historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her research specializations include African American history, the modern African diaspora, and women’s and gender studies, with broad interests in Black nationalist women and the global struggle for freedom, Black women and internationalism, the Black intellectual tradition, and human rights.

Blain authored Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), which 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. Her second book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited key volumes including Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (One World, 2021), which debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list and was a finalist for the 2022 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019); Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy (W.W. Norton, 2024); New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018); and Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016). She also authored Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton, 2025). Blain serves as editor-in-chief of Global Black Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press), was president of the African American Intellectual History Society from 2017 to 2021, and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 2022 and a member of the Society of American Historians Executive Board, elected in 2025. Her writings appear in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, and academic journals such as the Journal of Social History and Souls.

Professional Email: keisha_blain@brown.edu