Chad Williams

Chad Williams is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis 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.

Williams 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. His first book, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, was published in 2010 by the University of North Carolina Press. Widely praised as a landmark study, Torchbearers of Democracy won the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians, the 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History and designation as a 2011 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. He is co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and Major Problems in African American History, Second Edition (Cengage Learning, 2016). Chad has published articles and book reviews in numerous leading journals and collections. 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 Woodrow Wilson Foundation. His latest book, The Wounded World: W.E.B. Dubois and the First World War is forthcoming from Farrar Strauss.