Crystal Feimster is a tenured Associate Professor of African American and American Studies at Yale University. Her scholarship has centered on racial and sexual violence, social movements, law, war, and citizenship in the United States.

Her book, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, published in 2009 by Harvard University Press, tackles the subject of racialized sexual violence in the post Civil War South, using two women — Ida B. Wells, a black woman activist who fought against lynching and black women’s rape, and Rebecca Felton, a white woman who advocated for the lynching of black men — as a lens to analyze the complicated racial and sexual politics of the time. Dr. Feimster’s book was the winner of the W.E.B DuBois Book Prize and received an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians' Darlene Clark Hine Award.

Currently, Feimster is completing a project on rape and the Civil War. Her previous works include, “‘What if I Am A Woman?’: Black Women’s Campaigns for Sexual Justice and Citizenship”; “Not So Ivory: African American Women Historians Creating Academic Communities”; “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky;” and “General Benjamin Butler & the Threat of Sexual Violence during the American Civil War.”

Feimster teaches courses at Yale that bridge the fields of social and political history, including: The Long Civil Rights Movement, Critical Race Theory, African American Women’s History and New Orleans in the American Imaginary. She has received the Yale Provost Teaching Prize and the Graduate Mentor Award in Humanities for her outstanding teaching and mentorship of students.

Written by Jaden Richards, Class of 2021

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an esteemed author and speaker on racial inequality, social movements, and Black politics in the United States. In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root.

Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press, qualified her as a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. Race for Profit explores the federal government’s promotion of single-family homeownership in Black communities after the 1960s, as Taylor develops the idea of “predatory inclusion” to examine how low-income housing programs in the 1970s affected Black neighborhoods, Black women on welfare, and the emergent urban “underclass.”

Taylor’s earlier work, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, a collection of essays and interviews reflecting on the legacy of Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles, which won the Lamba Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018.

Professor Taylor was a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and is now a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Her work has appeared in many other publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. Dr. Taylor is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Written by Teyonce Allison, Class of 2021