Department of History

Françoise N. Hamlin (Ph.D. Yale University, 2004) is an Associate Professor in History and Africana Studies. She earned her Masters from the University of London, and her B.A. from the University of Essex (both in United States Studies). Hamlin is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), winner of the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War  is a co-edited anthology published by the University of Florida Press in 2015. It was a finalist for the QBR 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction, and was republished in paperback in 2018.  Hamlin's new research focuses on youth, trauma, and activism.

At Brown she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses primarily in twentieth century U.S. history, African American history, southern history, cultural studies and Africana Studies. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown, Professor Hamlin was a DuBois-Mandela-Rodney fellow at the University of Michigan (2004-2005), and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2005-2007). Since then she has been a Charles Warren Center Fellow at Harvard University (2007-2008), and a Woodrow Wilson-Mellon Fellow (2010-2011). Most recently she was the American Council of Learned Societies, Frederick Burkhardt Fellow (2017-2018) at the Radcliffe Institute. She is currently an Andrew Carnegie Foundation fellow (2021-2023).