Department of History

Keisha N. Blain is Professor of History and Africana Studies at Brown University and President of the Center for Engaged Scholarship. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow, Professor Blain is an award-winning historian of the 20th century United States with broad interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She completed a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2014. 

Professor Blain is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). The book 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 nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her third book, Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton, 2025), is the recipient of a 2026 Lillian Smith Book Award and a 2026 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winner for Social Change and Social Justice. It was also longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Professor Blain has also published five edited volumes. She is the co-editor of To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019); New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018); Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016); and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (Penguin Random House/One World, 2021). Four Hundred Souls debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers' list and was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Professor Blain's latest volume, Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy, was published by W.W. Norton in 2024. 

Professor Blain is now completing a book for W.W. Norton entitled Black Thinkers: The Global Impact of Black Intellectual Thought.