Barbara Ransby

Barbara Ransby is a historian, author, and longtime activist. She is professor of history, African American studies, and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also directs the Social Justice Initiative and the Gender and Women’s Studies Programs.

She serves on the editorial boards of the online journal The Black Commentator; the London-based journal Race and Class; and the Justice, Power and Politics Series at University of North Carolina Press. She is also on the Scholar’s Advisory Committee of Ms. magazine. She is the second editor-in-chief of SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, published quarterly.

She is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. Her latest book is Making All Black Lives Matter: Re-imagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century.