Carol AndersonRobert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies
Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University.
She is the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards; as well as, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, which was also published by Cambridge.
Anderson’s third book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and is also a New York Times Bestseller, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, and listed on the Zora List of 100 Best Books by Black Woman Authors since 1850.
Her young adult adaptation (with Tonya Bolden) of White Rage, We are Not Yet Equal, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
Anderson’s 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 Non-Fiction.
Her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America explores the anti-Blackness of the Second Amendment and the consequences for African Americans’ citizenship and lives. It has received a starred Kirkus Review and a starred Library Journal Review.
She 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, and selected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anderson has been elected into the American Philosophical Society. She has also been selected as the recipient of The Ella Baker Lifetime Achievement Award by The Hurston/Wright Foundation.
Anderson has served 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. She has also testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
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, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Anderson’s op-eds can be found in The Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and the Atlantic. Her Washington Post op-ed on Ferguson was the most shared for the newspaper in 2014. She has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, The Rachel Maddow Show, All In with Chris Hayes, NPR’s Fresh Air, The Mehdi Hasan Show, and more. Anderson is featured in several documentaries on voting rights, such as All In: The Fight for Democracy, Suppressed 2020, and After Selma.
Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee.
She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.
