Erik S McDuffie
· ProfessorUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · African American Studies
Active 2005–2025
About
Erik S McDuffie is a professor of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for African Studies. His research and teaching interests include Black movements, Black feminisms, Black (inter)nationalism, the Midwest, gender, sexualities, urban history, and Global Africa. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council for Learned Societies. McDuffie is the author of prize-winning monographs such as The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom and Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. His work has been published in various academic journals and edited volumes, and he is currently working on a book about Black Ohio abolitionist John Hatfield, exploring transnational linkages among mid-nineteenth-century African American midwesterners, Canada, Australia, and the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Professionally, he is actively involved in advancing African American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, African Studies, and Black Women's Studies, and has held leadership roles in the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Aesthetics
- Political economy
- Chemistry
- Art
- Philosophy
Selected publications
Communist Party of the United States
2025-01-23
bookSenior author2024-11-11
book1st authorCorrespondingIn The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. Throughout the region, Black thinkers, activists, and cultural workers, like the Grenada-born activist Louise Little, championed Black freedom. McDuffie explores Garveyism and its changing facets from the 1920s onward, including the role of Black midwesterners during the emergence of fascism in the 1930s, the postwar US Black Freedom Movement and African decolonization, the rise of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X in the 1950s and 1960s, and the continuing legacy of Garvey in today’s Black Midwest. Throughout, McDuffie evaluates the possibilities, limitations, and gendered contours of Black nationalism, radicalism, and internationalism in the UNIA and Garvey-inspired movements. In so doing, he unveils new histories of Black liberation and Global Africa.
2024-11-08
book1st authorCorresponding2024-01-01
book1st authorCorresponding2024-11-11
book1st authorCorrespondingNew York University Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
10. “[She] devoted twenty minutes condemning all other forms of government but the Soviet”: Black Women Radicals in the Garvey Movement and in the Left during the 1920s was published in Diasporic Africa on page 219.
Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 15 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
Chapter 4 Racing against Jim Crow, Fascism, Colonialism, and the Communist Party, 1940–1946
2020-10-07
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding1 “No Small Amount of Change Could Do”
New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 13 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
Chapter 2 Searching for the Soviet Promise, Fighting for Scottsboro and Harlem’s Survival, 1930–1935
2020-10-07
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 2 shared
Ashley D. Farmer
Illinois State University
- 1 shared
Komozi Woodard
- 1 shared
Robin D. G. Kelley
Awards & honors
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Univers…
- American Council for Learned Societies
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