DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

• amandajoycehall@northwestern.edu
• 1860 Campus Drive, Crowe Hall, Room 5-137

Amanda Joyce Hall is a historian of twentieth-century social movements with a specialization in Black freedom movements throughout the U.S., Africa, and the world. Her dissertation is a transnational social history that examines the international opposition to South African apartheid within the Black diaspora in the 1970s and 1980s. She samples the anti-apartheid movements led by students, workers, musicians, exiles, community organizers as they shut down Springbok rugby tours in Aotearoa/New Zealand, developed soundtracks of resistance across the Caribbean, demanded divestment from multi-national corporations in the U.S., and celebrated the repatriation of the African liberation movements to South Africa as triumphant symbol of their enduring efforts to dismantle color lines that were drawn both locally and internationally. Her cross-border research, which draws on archival work and oral histories from four continents, has been supported by the Newcombe Foundation, UCSB Department of Black Studies, the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) as well as the History Department, the African American Studies Department, the MacMillan Center, and International Security Studies at Yale.

Hall is currently a host of the New Books in African American Studies podcast channel on the New Books Network. She also remains committed to engaging broader audiences and expanding historical analysis through her digital humanities initiatives. Hall earned her doctorate in History and African American Studies from Yale University in 2022. She is from Chicago, IL.

Selected Publications:

“The Black Pacific and the Shapes of Global Black Power,” AAIHS (blog), June 30, 2021.

“Student Activism against Apartheid in the United States” invited submission in eds. Dan Berger and Emily K. Hobson, Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader, 1973-2001 (University of Georgia Press, 2020)