Tomorrow Foundation Chair of American History and Professor of History and African American and Black Diaspora Studies
he/him/his
African American and modern United States History and African American and African diasporic intellectual history
Chad Williams is the Tomorrow Foundation Chair of American Intellectual History and Professor of African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. He received both his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He specializes in African American and modern United States History and African American and African diasporic intellectual history.
Chad is the author of The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World, which was named a best book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Christian Science Monitor, longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Weld Award for Biography and a Museum of African American History Stone Book Award finalist. He is also author of the award-winning book Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, recipient of the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians and 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History, and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence and Major Problems in African American History, Second Edition.
Chad has published articles in numerous leading academic journals and collections, as well as op-eds, essays and reviews in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation. He has earned fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ford Foundation and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
He is currently working on two book projects, an exploration of the meaning and significance of Black Studies, and a history of the intellectual and political development of pan-Africanism and West African independence movements through the experiences of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah.