Tanisha C. Ford
Tanisha C. Ford is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015), which narrates the powerful intertwining histories of the Black Freedom movement and the rise of the global fashion industry. Liberated Threads won the 2016 Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for best book on civil rights history. She is a co-founder of TEXTURES, a pop-up material culture lab, creating and curating content on fashion and the built environment.
Tanisha's work centers on social movement history, feminist issues, material culture, the built environment, black life in the Rust Belt, girlhood studies, and fashion, beauty, and body politics. Her public writing and cultural commentary have been featured in diverse media outlets and publications including ELLE, The Atlantic, The Root, Aperture, The Feminist Wire, Cognoscenti, New York Times, The New Yorker, Ebony, NPR: Code Switch, Fusion, News One, New York Magazine: The Cut, Yahoo! Style, Vibe Vixen, and New York City’s HOT 97. Her scholarly research has been published in the Journal of Southern History, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Black Scholar, and Qed.
