Carol Anderson, Ph.D.

Carol Anderson, Ph.D. the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, is a nationally recognized historian, educator, and author whose research and teaching focus on the ways that policy is made and unmade, how racial inequality and racism affect that process and outcome, and how those who have taken the brunt of those laws, executive orders, and directives have worked to shape, counter, undermine, reframe, and, when necessary, dismantle the legal and political edifice used to limit their rights and humanity.

Prof. Anderson’s latest book is The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, a powerful assessment of the Second Amendment and how it was engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception, illuminating the history and impact of the amendment on Black Americans. Previous books include One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960; and Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955.

Prof. Anderson was named a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research has garnered an array of grants and fellowships, including those sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Prof. Anderson’s role as a public scholar has found her serving on working groups dealing with race, minority rights, and criminal justice at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, and the United Nations and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She is currently on the Advisory Board of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. She has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS NewsHour, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Democracy Now!, as well as providing commentary for the Huffington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post. Her op-ed in the Washington Post on Ferguson was the most shared for the newspaper in 2014.

Prof. Anderson has received numerous teaching awards, including the Crystal Apple Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, the University Scholar-Teacher Award, the Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching, the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, the Mizzou Class of ’39 Outstanding Faculty Award, the Most Inspiring Professor Award from the Athletic Department, the Gold Chalk Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching, and the Provost’s Teaching Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty.

Prof. Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee and is currently on the Advisory Board of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative.

She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Miami University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Political Science (International Relations) and a bachelor’s in history. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.