The History Department Welcomes its New Director of Public History – Dr. Nishani Frazier

The History Department is excited to welcome our new Professor of History and Director of Public History – Dr. Nishani Frazier.

Prior to joining North Carolina State University, Frazier was a faculty member at Miami University of Ohio and University of Kansas. Professor Frazier has also held professional public history positions as Associate Curator of African American History and Archives at Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS), Assistant to the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives at the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and personal assistant for Dr. John Hope Franklin, before and during his tenure as chair of President Bill Clinton’s advisory board on “One America”.  

Her research interests include 1960s freedom movements, oral history, museum studies, archives, and public history, black nationalist philosophy, digital humanities, and black economic development. Nishani’s publication, Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism was released with an accompanying website also titled Harambee City. Harambee City website is a digital project that creates a second layer of book “reading” via online access to maps, archival documents, teacher lesson plans, and oral history interviews.  

Frazier’s writings also include: co-editor for Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary History of the African American Experience (Columbia University Press, 2003); a policy paper for Democracy Collaborative “A ‘New Direction’: Community Wealth Building Black Community, Then and Now” Next System; co-authored essay, “Blackness is Not the Absence of Light: Restoring Black Visibility and Liberation of Digital Humanities in Debates in Digital Humanities; and multiple publications in Black Perspectives, AMSJ Blog, TruthOut, and more. Currently, she also serves as editor for the American Studies Journal. Upcoming publications include: “Sounds of Blackness” in Bloomberg’s Oral History Reader, ed. by Alistair Thomson, et al. 

Frazier received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2008, where she also earned her M.A and M. Phil in History. She holds a B.A. in English and History from Spelman College.

Professor Frazier is currently working on a tasty new book titled Cooking With Black Nationalism.