Michelle Mitchell 2019

Michele Mitchell

Associate Professor Of History

Education

Northwestern University, PhD 1998

Areas of Research/Interest

African Diaspora; Gender and Sexuality; United States, 1865-1945; West/East/South Africa; feminist theory

Fellowships and Honors

  • 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr., Faculty Award
  • 2017 – Senior Editor, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History
  • 2017 – 2018 Chair, Committee on Committees, Organization of American Historians
  • 2016-2017 Golden Dozen Award
  • 2014 – 2017 Committee on Committees (elected), American Historical Association
  • 2011 – 2014 Executive Board (elected), Organization of American Historians
  • 2010 – Advisory Board, New York University Press
  • 2010 – 2013 Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians
  • 2010 – 2012 Executive Committee, American Studies Association
  • 2009 – 2012 National Council (elected), American Studies Association
  • 2005 – 2008 North American Co-Editor of Gender & History
  • 2001 – 2002 Schomburg Center & National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library
  • 2001– 2002 J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship Award, American Historical Association & the Library of Congress (Declined)
  • 1997 – 1998 Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
  • 1996 – 1997 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
  • 1996 – 1997 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow (Declined)
  • 1996 Huggins-Quarles Award, Organization of American Historians
  • 1994 – 1996 Pre-Doctoral Fellow, The Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia
  • 1994 Field Researcher (Louisiana), “Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South,” Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University
  • 1991 Researcher, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, Stanford University

Books

Articles & Book Chapters

  • Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality
    Co-authored with Rebecca L. Davis, Heterosexual Histories
    New York: New York University Press, 2021, pp. 1-34
  • ‘Just the Status Quo?,’ Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
    Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19:2
    April 2020, pp. 305-313
  • Nadir
    Keywords For African American Studies, ed. Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar
    New York: New York University Press, 2018, pp. 115-120
  • Introduction: Gender, Imperialism, and Global Exchanges
    Co-authored with Naoko Shibusawa, in Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges, pp. 1-21; Gender & History 26:3
    November 2014, pp.393-413
  • Turns of the Kaleidoscope: ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, and Analytical Patterns in American Women’s and Gender History
    Journal of Women’s History 25:4
    Winter 2013 pp. 46-73
  • Comment on “Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender & Sexuality in African-American History
    Gender & History 11:3, November 1999, pp. 433-444
    Chosen as one of the “ten...most influential articles published in Gender & History over the last twenty-five years.”
  • A Corrupting Influence’: Idleness and Sexuality during the Great Depression
    Interconnections: Gender & Race in American History, ed. Carol Faulkner and Alison Parker
    Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012, pp. 187-228
  • ‘What a Pure, Healthy, Unified Race Can Accomplish’: Collective Reproduction and the Sexual Politics of Black Nationalism
    Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth W. Warren et al.
    Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2010, pp. 158-183
  • Practising Gender History
    Editorial co-authored with Karen Adler and Ross Balzaretti, Gender & History 20:1
    April 2008: pp. 1-7
  • ‘Lower Orders,’ Racial Hierarchies, and Rights Rhetoric: Evolutionary Echoes in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Thought during the late 1860s
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith
    New York: New York University Press, 2007, pp. 128-151
  • Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, and African Diasporas
    Co-authored with Sandra Gunning and Tera W. Hunter, in Dialogues of Dispersal, pp. 1-12; Gender & History 15:3
    November 2003: 397-408
  • Comment on Fernando Martínez Heredia’s “Nationalisms, Races, and Classes in the Revolution of 1895 and the Cuban First Republic
    Cuban Studies 33 (2002): 124-128
  • Exhibit review, “Of the People: The African American Experience”
    Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (Detroit, Michigan)
    The Public Historian 23:2 (Spring 2001) pp. 124-126
  • Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender & Sexuality in African-American History
    Gender & History 11:3
    November 1999, pp. 433-444
  • Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender & Sexuality in African-American History
    Gender & History: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Leonore Davidoff, Keith McClelland, and Eleni Varikas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000), pp.15-26
    Translated as “Silences maintenus et secrets rompus: genre et sexualité dans l'histoire africaine-américaine.” Trans. Anne Hugon.
  • ‘The Black Man's Burden’: African Americans, Imperialism, and Notions of Racial Manhood, 1890-1910
    International Review of Social History Supplement 44:4 (1999): 77-99
  • ‘The Black Man's Burden’: African Americans, Imperialism, and Notions of Racial Manhood, 1890-1910
    Simultaneously published in Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race, and Ethnicity, ed. Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens
    Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 77-99

Published Fieldwork

  • Interviews with Delores Thompson Aaron, Jessie Lee Chassion, and Brenda Bozant Davillier in “Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South”, A Book-and-CD Set
    Ed. William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad with Paul Oritz, Robert Parrish, Jennifer Ritterhouse, Keisha Roberts, and Nicole Waligora-Davis
    New York: The New Press, 2001
  • Excerpt of interview with Jessie Lee Chassion available on "Voices from Behind the Veil: Selections from the Center for Documentary Studies" (disc two, track three)
    Produced by Stephen Smith of American Radio Works in collaboration with the Behind the Veil Project
    Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University

selected consulting

Scholarly Advisor, Black Dolls, New-York Historical Society, February 2022-June 2022

On-screen commentary, Reframed: Marilyn Monroe, CNN. Premiere January 16, 2022

On-screen commentary, Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre, The History Channel. Premiere May 30, 2021

On-screen commentary, Lincoln: Divided We Stand, CNN. Premiere, February, 14, 2021

On-screen commentary (multiple episodes), Mysteries of the Abandoned, Discovery Science, May 2019-present

Scholarly Advisor, “Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” New-York Historical Society, 2017-2018

On-screen commentary about African American Civil War battle flags, Brad Meltzer’s Lost History, episode entitled “Hitler’s Photo Album,” Airdate November 7, 2014

On-screen commentary, History of Sex: The 20th Century, H2 Network (History Channel). Preview Airdate: September 16, 2014

Radio Interview, The Departed - Extinction in America, BackStory with the American History Guys, Released April 18, 2014

Commentary, Web Exclusive Videos on “African Slave Trade,” “American Railroad,” “The Amazing ALCAN,” “Bloody Sunday 1965,” and “Social Animals,” Mankind: The Story of All of Us (2012), The History Channel

“America I Am: The African-American Imprint” (touring museum exhibition; John Fleming, Executive Producer; Fath Davis Ruffins, National Curator)

“A Dream Deferred” (Program 4), course installment for “Transforming America: U.S. History Since 1877,” PBS Adult Learning Service & Annenberg/CPB. Producer: Dallas Telelearning. Preview Airdate: February 17, 2005.  Release date: Fall 2005

“Global Feminisms: Comparative Case Studies of Women’s Activism and Scholarship. Site: USA,” thematic film (on-screen commentary); Global Feminisms Project, University of Michigan.  Interview: Winter 2005

“Marcus Garvey:  Look for Me in the Whirlwind” (documentary); American Experience (PBS). Produced and Directed by Stanley Nelson;  Associate Producer, Gwendolyn D. Dixon;  written by Marcia Smith;  Executive Consultant, Robert Hill. First Airdate: February 12, 2001.