The decorated African American Studies scholar and Weinberg College alum returns to Northwestern looking to blend scholarship and social activism
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, one of the nation’s premier voices on race and politics, Black social movements and social activism, is joining the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, returning to the institution – and department – that first energized her scholarly pursuits.
Taylor will serve as the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies with a secondary faculty appointment at Northwestern’s heralded Institute for Policy Research.
“I am excited to come back to a familiar place and one with a rich history of leading African American Studies in the United States,” says Taylor, who earned her master’s and PhD degrees from Weinberg College in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
A decorated scholar, a powerful voice
Taylor returns to Northwestern following a decorated eight-year run at Princeton University, where she established herself as one of the nation’s most prominent African American scholars while penning essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times and other leading media outlets.
Taylor’s first book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016, while her second, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, cemented her status as an African American Studies scholar of note. Race for Profit, a revision of Taylor’s dissertation at Northwestern, earned a finalist nod for the Pulitzer in History while the title was also a National Book Award semifinalist. The book also received numerous awards including the 2020 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, 2020 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, 2020 James A. Rawley Prize, and more.
Last year, meanwhile, Taylor captured both a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Mary Pattillo, chair of the Department of African American Studies and the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, says Taylor brings a dynamic combination of deeply researched historical scholarship and trenchant political and social analysis to her work.
“With her powerful critical voice rooted in the liberatory imagination of Black Studies and in Black organizing traditions, she adds energy and momentum to the range of social justice initiatives at Northwestern,” Pattillo says of Taylor.
Research, teaching and activism
At Weinberg, Taylor looks forward to intensifying the relationship between two important areas of her professional life – scholarship and social activism – by blending Northwestern’s vast research-powering resources with Chicago’s longstanding and lively commitment to activism.
“I want to make connections between social activism and scholarship because I know one informs the other,” says Taylor, whose research investigates the political and economic forces underlying racial inequality.
Taylor will also teach courses on race and public policy, housing inequality in the U.S. and social movements. Her first course, a graduate seminar this winter, will focus on civil rights and Black liberation. She says her home department maintains an important role in cultivating the next wave of African American scholars, a charge she is particularly excited to propel.
“I hope to push students to ask the why and how questions, so they’re looking underneath surface explanations to investigate how society operates,” Taylor says, adding that such inquiry fuels critical thinking and ignites fresh perspectives, both in research and in the classroom.
“I’ve been lucky to be productive thus far in my career and am looking forward to building upon this at Northwestern by engaging closely with both colleagues and students in ways that are intellectually generative and productive.”