Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.
Background
At the core of her research agenda is how policy is made and unmade, how racial inequality and racism affect that process and outcome, and how those who have taken the brunt of those laws, executive orders, and directives have worked to shape, counter, undermine, reframe, and, when necessary, dismantle the legal and political edifice used to limit their rights and their humanity.
From growing up wondering and worrying about a brother serving in Vietnam to watching her neighborhood descend into a place the 6 o’clock news would repeatedly describe as “on the near eastside today. . .” Professor Anderson grasped early on that policymakers and activists were at work shaping our world. She set out to find out how and why and then grapple with the consequences.
"Anderson adeptly highlights both that past and the tenacious grip race holds on the present. There is a handful of writers whose work I consider indispensable. Professor Anderson is high up on that list."
William Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope
Experience
As an educator and historian, Professor Anderson has been lauded both by colleagues and students alike for her exciting, nuanced, and accessible approach to research and academia. She has received numerous teaching awards, including Emory’s Williams Award and the university’s Teacher-Scholar Award.
Her research has garnered an array of grants and fellowships, including those sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She was recently awarded a 2018 fellowship in Constitutional Studies by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Professor Anderson’s role as a public scholar has found her serving on working groups dealing with race, minority rights, and criminal justice at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, and the United Nations and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She is currently on the Advisory Board of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. She has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS NewsHour, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Democracy Now!, as well as providing commentary for the Huffington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post. Her op-ed in the Washington Post on Ferguson was the most shared for the newspaper in 2014.
She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Miami University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Political Science (International Relations) and a bachelor’s in history. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.
