Faculty Guide

Title

Associate Professor of African & Afro-American Studies

African and Afro-American Studies

Expertise

African American and modern United States History. African American military history. World War I. African American intellectual history.

Profile

Chad Williams is a native of California and grew up in San Francisco. He attended college at UCLA, where he earned a BA with honors in History and African American Studies. Chad received both his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Prior to arriving at Brandeis University, he taught at Hamilton College, one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. His courses have spanned U.S., African American and African diaspora history, broadly, and race, war and society, African American intellectual history, and the New Negro, specifically.

Chad is widely recognized as an expert on African Americans and World War I and, more generally, African Americans and the military. His first book, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Widely praised as a landmark study, Torchbearers of Democracy won the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians, the 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History and designation as a 2011 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. A recipient of the Hamilton College 2011 Dean’s Notable Year Scholarly Achievement Award, Chad has published articles and book reviews in numerous leading journals and collections. He has earned fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He is currently completing a study of W. E. B. Du Bois’s historical writings on World War I.

Awards and Honors

Mandel Faculty Grant in the Humanities (2012)

American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2011)

Dean of the Faculty Notable Year Achievement Award, Hamilton College (2011)

Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship (2007)

Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship (2006)

Scholar-in-Residence Program, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2006)

Courses Taught

AAAS	5a	Introduction to African and Afro-American Studies
AAAS	70a	Introduction to Afro-American History
AAAS	160b	African American Military History
AAAS	168b	The Black Intellectual Tradition

Scholarship

Williams, Chad. "“A Mobilized African Diaspora: The First World War, Military Service, and Black Soldiers as New Negroes”." Escape from New York! The “Harlem Renaissance” Reconsidered. Ed. Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 (forthcoming)

Williams, Chad. Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era. University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Williams, Chad. "African Americans and the Military." Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience: The Black Condition. Ed. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer. Michigan State University Press, 2009

Williams, Chad. "Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World War I Racial Militancy." Journal of African American History 92. No. 3 (2007): 347-370.