Scholarship and Biography
Chad Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. Chad earned a BA with honors in History and African American Studies from UCLA, and received both his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He specializes in African American and modern United States History, African American military history, the World War I era and African American intellectual history.
He is the author of The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World, which was named a best book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Christian Science Monitor. He is also author of the award-winning book Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, recipient of the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians and 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History, and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence and Major Problems in African American History, Second Edition.
Chad has published articles in numerous leading academic journals and collections, as well as op-eds, essays and reviews in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation. He has earned fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ford Foundation and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
His current research explores the history of Black Studies and Black intellectual and political development in the 1930s and 1940s at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.