Tekla Ali Johnson has been appointed professor of African-American studies at Clarkson University.
Ali Johnson’s research focus is on social justice issues in the United States, particularly the racial imagination as it relates to oppression and resistance matrices. Her current research projects include a forthcoming manuscript on the midwest chapter of the Black Panther Party and a digital humanities project on Urban Renewal and its impact on African American Communities.
Her first book, ‘Free Radical’: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race, earned a national book award from the National Council of Black Studies and a State Book Award from Nebraska. She is currently co-authoring a manuscript titled Forgotten Comrades.
Ali Johnson has published or co-published in SLIS Connecting, Nebraska History, and the Journal of Black Studies, among other publications and conference presentations. She has authored chapters in Out of the Fire: Readings in Africana Studies; Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: How African American History, Culture, and Studies Can Transform Africana Public Policy; Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854; and Readings in World Civilizations: Prehistory to the Present.
She is the recipient of the Anna Julia Cooper and CLR James Award for Outstanding Scholarly Publication in Africana Studies from the National Council of Black Studies; the UNCF/Mellon Faculty Residency Award Recipient at Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Center for Advanced Interdisciplinary Study; the Exemplary Diversity Scholar Citation by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity; and the Human Rights Dissertation Research Fellowship from the University of Nebraska. She has also served as project lead on grant awards from the National Parks Service, the Knight Foundation, and the National Archives.
Ali Johnson has been active in scholarly and collegiate organizations, including the Association for the Study of African American History and Life, the Western History Association, the National Council for Black Studies, the American Historical Association, the Society of American Archivists, the Digital Library Federation, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the National Jericho Movement (former national co-chair), the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, and the Association of Southern Women Historians.
She received her Ph.D. in history with an emphasis in Africana studies, her master of arts in history and her bachelor of arts in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and her master’s of library and information science from the University of Southern Mississippi.
She previously served as an assistant professor of history at Salem College and taught courses at Johnson C. Smith University.