Anastasia Curwood
Associate Professor of History and Director of African American and Africana Studies
Dr. Anastasia Curwood (she/her) is Associate Professor of History and Director of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She earned an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and an M.A. and Ph.D., both in History, from Princeton University. Using an interdisciplinary lens across history, African-American Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies, she writes about twentieth-century African-American women, gender, and sexuality, and African-American intellectuals, politics and culture. Her first book, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages Between the Two World Wars (North Carolina, 2010) centered on the cultural and social contests over African-Americans' marriages in the early twentieth century. Curwood is currently at work on Chisholm: The Life of an American Symbol, a critical biography. The work combines political science and social movement history to explain the origins and significance of Chisholm’s historic firsts in the United States Congress and in the 1972 race for the United States Presidency. The work rewrites the histories of both the black freedom struggle and late twentieth-century feminism by blending the study of protest with a focus on electoral politics.
Curwood is the recipient of several grants and honors, including a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Research Fellowship at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University.
Spotlight: Dr. Anastasia Curwood
"What’s so amazing is that human beings made decisions in the past that then had real consequences on the daily lives of my fellow humans. I became really interested in contingencies – why people made the decisions they made and how we got here. It still is a touchstone for me, not only in my academic work but in my life; I think about who has come before and who has had these struggles. In DEI work, I find it indispensable to know where we are coming from and why."
Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies
Dr. Curwood also serves as the Director of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies. With five innovative research themes and dozens of areas of sub-speciality research, the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies is the epicenter of vital scholarship, building a legacy for future generations and leading the field of Black Studies forward, locally and globally.