Alison Parker

Alison M. Parker is Richards Professor of American History. She has research and teaching interests at the intersections of gender, race, disability, citizenship and the law in U.S. history. She majored in art history and history at the University of California, Berkeley and earned her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2017–2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, where she worked on her biography of the civil rights activist and suffragist Mary Church Terrell, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (University of North Carolina Press, 2020; second edition, paperback, March 2025). Her op-ed “When White Women Wanted a Monument to Black ‘Mammies,’” appeared in the New York Times (February 6, 2020). Parker is also the author of two historical monographs, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (1997). She has co-edited three anthologies and authored numerous articles and book chapters. Her most recent article is “Oscar Stanton DePriest: Republican Politics, the Strategy of Non-Partisanship, and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” in The Journal of African American History (V, 108, n. 4, Fall 2023). Parker is now working on a new book on a social movement organizer, the civil rights activist Mary Hamilton, who served as field secretary and Southern Regional Director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the early 1960s.