Paul Ortiz

Professor Paul Ortiz (PhD Duke University, 2000) is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which received the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. His book Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 was awarded the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology. He also co-edited and conducted oral history interviews for the book, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South.

He teaches undergraduate courses and supervises graduate fields in African American history, Latinx history, comparative ethnic studies, U.S. South, labor, social movement theory, oral history and field work methodologies among other topics.

Ortiz is currently working on three books: Settler Colonialism and the ‘War on Terror’: 1492 to the Present, which will be published by Beacon Press. He is co-editing a book with Wesley Hogan of Duke University titled Changing the System Now: People Power, History, and Organizing in the 21stCentury, which includes contributions by William Greider, Lane Windham, Ernie Cortes and other activist intellectuals. He is currently finishing a synthesis of the segregated South with William H. Chafe titled: Behind the Veil: African Americans in the Age of Segregation, 1895-1965.