Professor of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Spring 2024
Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Co-Director and Co-Principal Investigator (with Tianna S. Paschel) of the Black Studies Collaboratory, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Raiford received her BA from Wesleyan University and PhD from Yale University. She is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (North Carolina, 2011), a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize. She is co-author (with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler) of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (Thames and Hudson, 2024). She is co-editor (with Heike Raphael-Hernandez) of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora (Washington, 2017), and (with Renee Romano) of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Georgia, 2006). Raiford’s work has appeared in academic journals, including American Quarterly, Art Journal, Small Axe, History and Theory, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, as well as in Artforum, Aperture, Ms. Magazine, and online for The Atlantic and Al-Jazeera. Raiford’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Volkswagen Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Hellman Family Foundation.