CFS Grad Imani Perry is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow

“My work is an effort to haunt the past by honoring the nobility of the disregarded, to hold fast to the Black Southern intellectual tradition I have been gifted with, and to offer something beautiful and ethical for the ones coming after me.”

 

CFS graduate Imani Perry was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2023. Her work as a scholar and a writer across many disciplines brings new light and perspective to African American social conditions and experiences, especially those of Black women. Her work looks at the resistance, survival, and thriving of Black Americans in the face of oppression and injustice.

 

She has written a number of books, including May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, and her latest book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.

 

Perry is also currently a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the Henry A. Morss, Jr., and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies and co-founder of the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard University, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic.

 

You can read more on the MacArthur Fellows site.

 

Congratulations, Imani!