Erik McDuffie

Erik S. McDuffie is Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History and the Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research and teaching interests include Black feminism, Black movements, Black internationalism, Black queer theory, urban history, the Midwest, and Global Africa. He is the author of The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the U.S. Heartland, and Global Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024). The book won the 2024 Jon Gjerde Prize, presented by the Midwestern History Association. His first book Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) won the 2012 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, as well as the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. He is also the author of several scholarly articles and essays published in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal; African Identities; American Communist History; Biography; Journal of African American History; Journal of West African History; Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International Women of Color; Radical History Review; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; and Women, Families, and Children of Color, among other journals and edited volumes. Originally from Detroit, McDuffie is a sixth-generation midwesterner, whose family hails from the United States, Canada, and St. Kitts.