Department ofAfrican American Studies

Nan Elizabeth Woodruff

Professor of African American Studies and Modern U.S. History

Professional Bio

Nan Elizabeth Woodruff is a historian of Twentieth Century African American History. Her most recent book, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Harvard University Press, 2003), focused on the African American freedom struggle in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. It received the 2004 McClemore Prize and Honorable Mention for the 2004 Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change Book Prize. The University of North Carolina Press released in 2012 a paperback edition of American Congo. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Radical History Review, and in Charles Payne and Adam Green, Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950, among others. She is completing a book on The Legacies of Everyday Struggle: History, Memory, and Trauma in Grenada, Mississippi in the Post Civil Rights Era. She teaches courses on the African American Freedom Struggle, African American History, and African Americans in the Twentieth Century. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, and most recently was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle, NC.

Please contact Dr. Woodruff directly for access to her CV.

Nan Elizabeth Woodruff