Faculty

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies

Professor Higginbotham's research and writing focus primarily on African American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Higginbotham is co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of African American Lives (2004), as well as The Harvard Guide to African-American History (2001), co-edited with Darlene Clark Hine, and Leon Litwack. Her 1993 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920 has won book prizes from the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Black Women Historians, and the Association for Research on Non-Profit and Voluntary Organizations. She also co-edited History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates and Contestations (1997). Her articles on African American women's history cover such diverse themes as constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, religion, and the intersection of theory and history. Her article, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs (Winter 1992) won the Best Article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1993. A more recent article, "Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s," appeared in the anthology The House that Race Built (1997) edited by Wahneena Lubiano. She is also completing a study for the Lily Endowment on the history of its grantmaking to African American religious institutions and programs. Her current research and writing include a biography of Katherine Johnson, the first field worker for the NAACP, and a second book on racial construction of citizenship.

Professor Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in American History, an M.A. from Howard University, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before coming to Harvard, she taught at Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and New York University.