Fellowship / Fellows

Ashley D. Farmer

  • 2019–2020
  • Humanities
  • Joy Foundation Fellow
  • University of Texas at Austin
Headshot of Ashley Farmer
Photo Courtesy of Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Ashley D. Farmer is an assistant professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Stone Book Award from Museum of African American History and won an honorable mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award. Farmer’s work focuses on black women’s history, intellectual history, and radical politics.

While at Radcliffe, Farmer is working on the first intellectual and political biography of “Queen Mother” Audley Moore. Documenting her 70-year activist career, Farmer argues that Moore was an important but overlooked progenitor of 20th-century black political thought by illustrating how her organizing and theorizing was adopted and enacted by black activists, including Malcolm X and such groups as the Black Panther Party. Farmer’s work offers an important corrective to the still largely male-dominated understandings of black struggle and shows how this remarkable woman fundamentally alters popular and scholarly understandings of 20th-century organizing.

Farmer’s scholarship has appeared in numerous venues including the Black Scholar and the Journal of African American History. Her research has also been featured in several popular outlets including Vibe, NPR, and the Chronicle Review. She is a leader of the African American Intellectual History Society and a coeditor of the Black Power Series, a book series published by NYU Press. Farmer earned her PhD at Harvard University.

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