Elsa Barkley Brown

Ph.D. (1994) Kent State University, B.A. (1972) DePauw University. Dr. Barkley Brown holds a joint appointment in History and Women's Studies and is an affiliate faculty with Afro-American Studies. Before coming to the University of Maryland in the fall of 1997, she taught in the Center for Afro-American and African Studies and the Department of History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on African American political culture with an emphasis on gender. She is co-editor of the two-volume Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1993) which received the Leticia Woods Brown Memorial Publication and Edited Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians and the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Black Women's Studies. Her publications include "To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women's Political History, 1865-1880," in African American Women and the Vote 1837-1965, ed. A. Avakian et al. (1997); "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture 7 (fall 1994) which received both the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best article in southern women's history from the Southern Association for Women Historians and the Leticia Woods Brown Memorial Publication Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians; "Imaging Lynching: African-American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory," in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (1995); "Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond," Journal of Urban History (1995); "'What has Happened Here': The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics," in Feminist Studies (1992); "African-American Women's Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African-American Women's History," in Signs (1989); and "Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke," in Signs (1989) which won the Martin Luther King, Jr. Prize for best scholarly article in African American history and the Leticia Woods Brown Memorial Publication Prize from the Association of Black Woman Historians. She is currently on the Editorial Board for Gender and History.

Department of Women's Studies 2101 Woods Hall University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 301.405.6877 • (fax) 301.314.9190 • (TDD) 301.314.8478 • womensstudies@umd.edu