Rate My Professor Mia Bay

Mia Bay is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of History and a Fellow of Jesus College. A graduate of the University of Toronto with a B.A., she completed her M.Phil. and Ph.D. at Yale University under the supervision of David Brion Davis. Her academic career includes serving as the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and as an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she directed the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. Professor Bay is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and serves on the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.

Professor Bay specializes in American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history, with particular interests in black women’s thought, African American citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Her seminal works include Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), which garnered the Bancroft Prize, PROSE Award for Excellence in American History, OAH’s Liberty Legacy Award, Lillian Smith Book Award, Order of the Coif Book Award, and David J. Langum Prize in Legal History; To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Hill & Wang, 2009); and The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000). She has also edited Ida B. Wells’s The Light of Truth (Penguin, 2014), co-authored Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012, 2017, 2021), and co-edited Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (UNC Press, 2015) and Race and Retail (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Bay serves on editorial boards for the Journal of African American History, Modern Intellectual History, and Reviews in American History. Her scholarship has earned fellowships from the National Humanities Center, American Council of Learned Societies, and others, and she has advised projects at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress, significantly impacting the field of African American history.