Barbara Ransby

Dr. Barbara Ransby is the John D. MacArthur Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She also directs the campus-wide Social Justice Initiative, a project that promotes connections between academics and community organizers working on social justice. She graduated from Columbia University and the University of Michigan as a Mellon Fellow.

Dr. Ransby is the author of two award-winning books: Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003); and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (2013). She is also the author of a third book published in August 2018 entitled: Making All Black Lives Matter: Re-imagining Freedom in the 21st Century. 

The Ella Baker book received eight national awards and recognitions, including the Liberty – Legacy award from the Organization of American Historians, the Joan Kelly prize from the American Historical Association, and the James A. Rawley Prize (also from the AHA). In 2018 the Chronicle of Higher Education acknowledged the Baker biography as “one of the most influential books of the last twenty years.” 

Her second biography, Eslanda, received the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial prize for the best African American women’s history book from the Association of Black Women Historians. In 2017 Dr. Ransby was honored as “one of the top 25 women in higher education” by the publication Diverse Issues in Higher Education. She also receives the 2018 Angela Y. Davis Prize from the American Studies Association for scholarship in service of the public good. 

In 2020 Dr. Ransby received two honors. She was elected as a fellow of the Society of American Historians. She received one of the inaugural Freedom Scholar’s Awards from the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation for the “social and economic justice scholarship.” She is also editor in chief of Souls: a critical journal of Black politics, culture, and society, and is a member of the editorial working group of the London-based journal Race and Class and the Editorial Advisory Board of the “Justice, Politics, and Power” book series at University of North Carolina Press. 

She served as President of the National Women’s Studies Association from 2016 – to 2018. Dr. Ransby regularly publishes in popular venues: DISSENT, In These Times, Colorlines, The Nation, the Boston Review, Truthout, and the New York Times. Dr. Ransby is a historian, writer, and longtime activist. She was deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid/ Free South Africa movement in the 1980s. She later co-founded several organizations, including The Ella-Baker Nelson Mandela Center, Ella’s Daughters, and African American Women in Defense of Ourselves. 

She is a founding member of the national organization Scholars for Social Justice and works closely with The Movement for Black Lives and the multi-racial coalition, The Rising Majority. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago and the grassroots Chicago-based, Equity and Transformation (E.A.T.), which supports formerly incarcerated persons and those working in the informal economy.