Martha Biondi
Director of Graduate Studies, Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies; Professor of History
M.A. Columbia University
B.A. Barnard College, Columbia University
- m-biondi@northwestern.edu
- 1860 Campus Drive, Crowe Hall, Room 5-107
Research Interests:
20th Century African American History with a focus on social movements, politics, labor, gender, cities, and international affairs
Courses:
AFAM 220 The Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement
AFAM 212 Introduction to African American History
AMAM 440 Black Historiography
Most Recent Book:
We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025) This book tells the transnational story of the Chicago anti-apartheid and anticolonial solidarity movement through the organizing work of Prexy Nesbitt. From the 1960s to the 1990s, he built upon multiple international networks to combat imperialism and racism locally and globally. Reviewed here.
Recent Awards:
The Black Revolution on Campus won the 2012 National Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis
The Black Revolution on Campus won the 2013 Wesley-Logan Prize from the AHA and the ASALH for an outstanding book on some aspect of the history of the dispersion, settlement, and adjustment, and the return of peoples originally from Africa.
2004. Myers Outstanding Book Award for To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
2003. Thomas J. Wilson Prize awarded to To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City by the Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press as the best first book of the year.
Recent Publications:
The Black Revolution on Campus (2014, University of California Press)
"Black Student Organizing and Early Visions for African American Studies," Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies (forthcoming 2012)
“Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development and Future Trajectory of African American Studies,” Daedalus, 140 (Spring 2011.)
“Brooklyn College Belongs to Us: Black Students and the Transformation of Higher Education in New York City,” Clarence Taylor, ed. Civil Rights in New York City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011)
"Student Protest, 'Law and Order' and the Origins of African American Studies in California," forthcoming, in volume edited by Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen, Columbia University Press.
"The Rise of the Reparations Movement," Radical History Review 87 (Fall 2003)
To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (2003, Harvard University Press)