Rate My Professor Traci Parker

Traci Parker is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, affiliated with the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. She specializes in African American history, with research interests encompassing the Black freedom movement, civil rights activism, labor history, consumer capitalism, gender, and consumer politics from the 1930s to the 1980s. Parker earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in History from Cornell University. Prior to her tenure-track position at UMass Amherst, she held postdoctoral fellowships at prestigious institutions including the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute/Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.

Parker is the author of the acclaimed monograph Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), which was selected as a 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She co-edited The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience, and Justice (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), addressing key topics such as youth activism, voting rights, and local freedom struggles. Her current projects include Revolutionary Love, under contract with Bloomsbury Press, and an edited collection on love, sex, and relationships in twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. At UMass Amherst, Parker has been honored with the 2022 Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award, the 2017 Lilly Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholars program. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of American History, the Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award committee, the executive board of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and advisory boards for the Massachusetts Historical Society’s African American History Seminar and The HistoryMakers. Parker frequently engages the public through lectures, such as the 2023 Commonwealth Honors College Plenary Lecture on W.E.B. Du Bois, and media appearances on C-SPAN, CNN, PBS, and the History Channel, as well as op-eds in the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun.