Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

professor, English, Harvard

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and has held this position since 2006. She also served as Acting-Director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in the Spring 2008. 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 on the full-time faculties of Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and New York University. Higginbotham is the author of *Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920* (1993), which won numerous book prizes, most notably 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. *Righteous Discontent* was also included among the New York Times Book Review's Notable Books of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Her writings span diverse fields--African American religious history, women's history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history. One of her most cited and reprinted articles is "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," winner of the best article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1993.