Keona Ervin

St. Louis native Keona K. Ervin is Assistant Professor of African-American History and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She earned her B.A. from Duke University with a double major in History (with honors) and African and African American Studies. She completed doctoral study at Washington University in St. Louis where she earned a Ph.D. in History. Prior to joining the MU faculty, Ervin was Consortium for Faculty Diversity Post-Doctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and History at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

Ervin completed her book, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis, published by the University of Kentucky Press as a title in the Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century series edited by Steven F. Lawson and Cynthia G. Fleming. She is a Center for Missouri Studies Faculty Fellow at the State Historical Society of Missouri. A recipient of the Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (2015), and Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellowship from the University of Missouri-Columbia (2015), and the Huggins-Quarles Dissertation Award from the Organization of American Historians (2008), she has published in International Labor and Working-Class History and the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. She is also the author of an article in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. She is currently working on two new projects, one on the history of black women and the U.S. labor movement, and the other on working-class organization and black radical politics in the late twentieth century.

With State Historical Society of Missouri executive director Gary Kremer, Ervin is directing a new lecture series, The African-American Experience in Missouri, which brings a host of scholars and subject-matter experts to campus to address black historical experiences from the earliest period of statehood to the present. From 2016-2019, Ervin will serve on the Board of Directors of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.