Keynote: Teaching about Free & Fair Elections: A Conversation with Dr. Carol Anderson

Dr. Carol Anderson

Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies, Emory University

Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of five books. Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards. Next, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, was published by Cambridge. Her third book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her fourth book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Nonfiction. Her fifth book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, was a New York Times Editor’s pick, Best Social Science Books of 2021 by Library Journal, and one of Writer’s Bone, Best Books of 2021.

Anderson has been elected into the Society of American Historians, named a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected to the American Philosophical Society.

In addition to numerous teaching awards, her research has garnered fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, the University of Connecticut’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, the University of Chicago’s Pozen Center for Human Rights, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She’s been awarded the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University. Anderson also was honored with the James W. C. Pennington Award from Heidelberg University (Germany).

Anderson has also been selected as a Presidential Scholar at Amherst College. In 2023 she was honored with the Ella Baker Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She was also a member of the US State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee; the Pulitzer Prize Committee for History; and the National Book Awards Committee in Non-fiction. Anderson earned her PhD in history from The Ohio State University.