Rhonda Y. Williams

Rhonda Y. Williams is associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University and program faculty for the ethnic studies and women and gender studies programs there. She teaches courses on African American and women’s history, social policy, and social movements. Her research, which focuses on race, gender, and urban politics, pays particular attention to poor people’s experiences and struggles after the 1930s in the United States. She is author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004), which won an award from the Association of Black Women Historians. She is currently working on a book on the history and culture of illegal narcotics in cities following World War II tentatively entitled The Dope Wars.

Lecture topics:

• Obscured Lives: Poor Black Women and Struggles for Justice
• Rethinking Urban History from the Margins
• Black Women and Engendering Black Power
• From the Politics of Public Housing to the Politics of Drugs
• Keepers of Information: Oral History, Performance, and Pedagogy

Viewed Saturday, November 21, 2009