Mia Bay

Professor Mia Bay is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. Professor Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history whose recent interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Bay’s most recent book is the prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Her other works include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925; To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, and the edited work *Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader. *She is also the co-author of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents, and the co-editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line. Bay’s current projects include a new book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.  Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits— “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876–1968”—and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project.