Keisha N. Blain

Keisha N. Blain, National Fellow, is an award-winning historian and writer. She is currently a full professor of Africana Studies and history at Brown University and an opinion columnist for MSNBC. Her writing has been featured in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Nation, Foreign Affairs, and more. She is the author of the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); and the coeditor (with Ibram X. Kendi) of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (Penguin Random House/One World, 2021). Her latest book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021), was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dr. Blain is currently writing her Fellows project, a major new history of human rights framed by the ideas and activism of Black women in the United States from 1865 to the present. The book will be published by W.W. Norton.

Selected Work

• Civil Rights International: The Fight Against Racism Has Always Been Global: A global overview of the Black freedom struggle from the early twentieth century to the rise of Black Lives Matter in Foreign Affairs.
• The Black Women Who Have Paved the Way for This Moment: An exploration of how Black women have shaped political and social movements in the United States since the 1920s for the Atlantic.
• Fannie Lou Hamer’s Dauntless Fight for Black Americans’ Right to Vote: A profile on the life and activism of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer for Smithsonian Magazine.
• The Long Brutality: Black Women and the Struggle to End Police Violence: An exploration of how the police shootings of Eleanor Bumpurs in 1984 and Breonna Taylor in 2020 sparked local, national, and global anti-racist movements in the Baffler.