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Erik S McDuffie

Profile picture for Erik S McDuffie

Contact Information

1201 W. Nevada Street
M/C 143

Associate Professor, African American Studies and History

Biography

Erik S. McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African AmericanStudies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research andteaching interests include the African diaspora, the Midwest, black feminism,black queer theory, black radicalism, urban history, and black masculinity.  He is the author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). The book won the 2012 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, as well as the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.  He is also the author of several scholarly articles and essays published in African and Black Diaspora: An International JournalAfrican IdentitiesAmerican Communist HistoryBiographyJournal of African American HistoryJournal of West African HistoryPalimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International Women of ColorRadical History ReviewSouls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Women, Families, and Children of Color among other journals and edited volumes. 

Currently, he is working on a new book, tentatively titled Garveyismin the Diasporic Midwest: The American Heartland and Global Black Freedom,1920-80.  Drawing from original research conducted in Canada, Ghana, Grenada, Jamaica, Liberia, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States, the book is the first to establish the importance of the Midwest to twentieth-century black transnational politics and to demonstrate vibrant political exchanges between the heartland and African world through Garveyism.  The book has received recognition. In 2017, he won an American Council for Learned Societies fellowship and the Outstanding Research Contribution in African American Studies Award from the Department of African American at the University of Illinois.  In 2016, he received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.  In  2014, he received the Richard and Margaret Romano Professional Scholar award from the University of Illinois.  The three-year award is based upon the recognition of scholars’ outstanding achievements in research andleadership at UIUC.  Professionally, he is a member of several scholarly associations.  These include the Association for the Study of the Worldwide AfricanDiaspora (ASWAD), American Historical Association (AHA), Association for theStudy of African American Life and History (ASALH), Association of Black WomenHistorians (ABWH), American Studies Association (ASA), Organization of AmericanHistorians (OAH). His sits on the executive board of ASWAD.

He has taught at the University of Illinois and University of Delaware. In 2010,   he won the Helen Corley Petit Award   (Illinois). This honor is given for extraordinary accomplishment during the tenure probation period by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He also received the Outstanding Teaching Awardin African American Studies from the Department of African American Studies(Illinois) for AY 2010-11. He earned his Ph.D. in history in 2003 from New York  University with a concentration in the African diaspora and U.S. history since1865.  Originally from Detroit, McDuffie is a sixth generation Midwesterner, whose family hails from the United States, Canada, and St. Kitts.

Research Interests

The African diaspora, the Midwest, black feminism, black queer theory, black radicalism, urban history, and black masculinity.

Education

History: African Diaspora/U.S. History since 1865, Ph.D., New York University
History, M.A., Temple University
History, B.A., Hamilton College

Additional Campus Affiliations

Associate Professor, African American Studies
Associate Professor, History
Associate Professor, Program in Jewish Culture and Society
Associate Professor, Center for African Studies
Associate Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Associate Professor, Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies

Recent Publications

McDuffie, E. S. (2021). “For a New Antifascist, Anti-imperialist People’s Coalition”: Claudia Jones, Black Left Feminism, and the Politics of Possibility in the Era of Trump. In Post–Cold War Revelations and the American Communist Party: Citizens, Revolutionaries, and Spies (pp. 185-204). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc..

Mcduffie, E. (2019). Review: S.M. Ward's In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs. Journal of African American History, 104(2), 331-334. https://doi.org/10.1086/702433

McDuffie, E. S. (2019). "A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century": The Black Radical Vision of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. In P. L. Sinitiere (Ed.), Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois (pp. 67-100). (Critical Insurgencies). Northwestern University Press.

McDuffie, E. S. (2019). Black Women, the Nation of Islam, and the Pursuit of Freedom through the Promise of Patriarchy. Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 5(1), 80-84. https://doi.org/10.5406/jcivihumarigh.5.1.0080

McDuffie, E. S. (2019). “The Second Battle for Africa Has Begun”: Rev. Clarence W. Harding Jr., Garveyism, Liberia, and the Diasporic Midwest, 1966–1978. In R. J. Stephens, & A. Ewing (Eds.), Global Garveyism (pp. 89-113). University Press of Florida. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvx071xx.7

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