DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning scholar and public intellectual. Taylor is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2021.

Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018.

Taylor’s scholarship examines racism and public policy, inequality, Black politics, radical politics and social movements in the United States, both in historical and contemporary contexts.

Taylor is working on two projects, one that look at the dynamics of race, class and politics in the first generation after the Black social movements of the 1960s and a book that examines the Black radical tradition mediated through the life and politics of Angela Y. Davis.

Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.  Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation and Jacobin, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.

Taylor has been named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians.
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For eight years, Taylor was a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University.