Bio

Shawn Leigh Alexander, who received his PhD from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004, is a Professor and Chairperson of African and African American Studies, and the director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas. His area of research concentration is African American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries. 

Professor Alexander is the author of An Army of Lions: The Struggle for Civil Rights before the NAACP (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist (Roman and Littlefield, 2015).  He has also edited an anthology of T. Thomas Fortune's writings, T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator (University Press of Florida, 2008), a collection on the racial violence after the civil war, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015), a critical edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), as well as an introduction to William Sinclair's classic 1905 study, The Aftermath of Slavery: A Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro (University of South Carolina Press, 2012). Additionally, he has authored many scholarly articles and book chapters on early African American civil rights activity and black intellectual history.  Currently he is working on a history of the NAACP in the 1930s.

In addition Dr. Alexander is a public facing scholar and in this capacity he has been a frequent consultant and contributor for Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and NPR among other outlets. He has also be a featured scholar and consultant on PBS documentaries, including “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War” (2019) and“Niagara Movement: The Early Battle for Civil Rights” (2023) and CSPAN programing, including among others, American History TV's Congress Investigates. Additionally, he has been an expert consultant for museums, court cases, and local and national historical commissions. Finally, Dr. Alexander is the author of the Lawrence Times' column on race, history, and politics, "The Way of the Wide, Wide World."

Prior to joining the University of Kansas, Professor Alexander taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, Gettysburg College, and Yale University, where he was the first Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellow (2005-2007) in the Department of History.