Françoise N. Hamlin

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

Françoise N. Hamlin is an associate professor of history and Africana studies at Brown University. She is a US historian specializing in the diverse array of African American experiences and epistemologies, particularly during struggles for freedom and equality. She is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), awarded the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Book Award, and coeditor of These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship (University Press of Florida, 2015), a finalist for the QBR Phyllis Wheatley Book Award in nonfiction.

Hamlin is positioning children and youth at the center of the postwar African American civil rights movements by addressing activism’s personal and communal costs. At the intersection of multiple fields (civil rights histories, African American studies, trauma studies, childhood studies, psychology, and memory), the project nuances the heroic narrative, exposing complicated and long-term realities. Moreover, it exposes movement-building challenges—then and now—while celebrating those who sacrificed so much in the pursuit of freedom and justice.

Hamlin earned her doctorate in African American studies and American studies at Yale University. Her most notable fellowships and awards include the Charles Warren Center Fellowship at Harvard University; the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize; the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan; and a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.