Professor Imani Perry, who received the National Book Award for Nonfiction on November 16, will join Harvard’s faculty in the fall of 2023. She will be appointed jointly as Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and in African and African American Studies. She is scheduled to teach a course on Black feminist theory in fall 2023 and the WGS Junior Tutorial in Spring 2024.
Perry received the award for her critically acclaimed 2022 book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Isabel Wilkerson, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, called South to America, “An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South – and thus of America – by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time.” An excerpt of the book is available on the Harvard Gazette’s website.
Perry is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies. She is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, and an author of creative nonfiction.
Professor Perry earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies. Her writing and scholarship primarily focus on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.
She is the author of eight books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle. Looking for Lorraine was also named a 2018 notable book by the New York Times, and an honor book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was a finalist for the African American Intellectual History Society Paul Murray Book Prize.
Her book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, won the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award for the best book in American Studies, the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction. Her seventh book, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019), was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.
The WGS community is thrilled that Professor Perry will be joining us next fall, and we hope that you will help us welcome her to campus.
