Alison Parker
Alison Parker
Founder, UD Anti-Racism Initiative (UDARI)
Biography
Alison M. Parker is Richards Professor of American History. She has research and teaching interests at the intersections of gender, race, disability, citizenship and the law in U.S. history. She majored in art history and history at the University of California, Berkeley and earned her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2017-2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, where she worked on her biography of the civil rights activist and suffragist Mary Church Terrell, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (University of North Carolina Press, 2020; second edition, paperback, March 2025). Her op-ed “When White Women Wanted a Monument to Black 'Mammies,'" appeared in the New York Times (February 6, 2020). Parker is also the author of two historical monographs, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (1997). She has co-edited three anthologies and authored numerous articles and book chapters. Her most recent article is “Oscar Stanton DePriest: Republican Politics, the Strategy of Non-Partisanship, and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” in The Journal of African American History (V, 108, n. 4, Fall 2023). Parker is trained to lead anti-racism and racial justice workshops and community conversations and is working to recruit and retain a diverse community of faculty and students.
Education
- Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, History, 1993.
- M.A., The Johns Hopkins University, History, 1990.
- B.A., University of California, Berkeley, History and the History of Art, Phi Beta Kappa, 1988.
Recent Media
Black History Month Celebration: 1-on-1: Expert highlights Mary Church Terrell's role in civil rights, education in DC, WJLA ABC 7 News, Arlington, VA, Feb. 13, 2025.
Research Interview with Mary Church Terrell Papers Interns, Connecting Communities Digital Initiative (CCDI), Library of Congress, Fall 2023.
Podcast Interview by Caree Banton, for KUAF's Undisciplined, Spring 2023.
Radio Interview by Gerald Horne on Unceasing Militant, for KPFK's Freedom Now, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, June 2022.
Publications
Books
Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (University of North Carolina Press, John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, 2020; second edition, paperback, March 2025). Chosen as one of “The Best Black History Books of 2020,” African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Black Perspectives, December 21, 2020.
Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. https://www.niupress.niu.edu/niupress/Scripts/Book/bookResults.asp?ID=546
Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933, University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Edited Books
Interconnections: Gender and Race in American History, edited by Alison M. Parker & Carol Faulkner (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012, paperback 2014).
Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, edited by Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Alison M. Parker and Stephanie Cole, Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
Upcoming & Recent Invited Talks
“Champions of Equality: Unceasing Militant Mary Church Terrell,” Alice Paul Center for Gender Justice, Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, May 2025.
“Black Girl’s and Young Women’s Clubs: The Mary Church Terrell Clubs,” for the History of Women and Gender series, New York University, April 2025.
Book Club Talk on Unceasing Militant (2nd ed.), Lillie Jackson Carroll Civil Rights Museum, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, April 2025.
“Women’s Leadership Styles in Historical Perspective,” talk for the National Women’s History Museum Speakers Bureau, April 2023, March 2025.
“The History and Legacy of Comstock and Censorship,” New York Historical Society, Center for Women’s History, Fall 2024.
“Black Women’s Letters to Mary Church Terrell: Exploring Epistolary Relationships,” Modern U.S. History Workshop, Binghamton University, Spring 2024.
“Fighting for Equality: Integration of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), 1946-1949,” California AAUW (virtual), February 2024.
“The Life of Mary Church Terrell,” African American Museum and Library of Oakland, California, January 2024.
“Historical Perspectives on Black Women’s Cross-Class Advocacy for Justice in the Carceral System,” Truth in Education: A 24-Hour Teach-In for America, Institute for Common Power, May 2023.
“Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell," James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, Emory University, March 2023.
Recent Conference Presentations
Roundtable on Amrita Myers’s The Black President’s Wife, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) conference, Providence, RI, July 2025.
“African American Women’s Internationalism & Cosmopolitanism,” commentator, Organization of American Historians, Chicago, April 2025.
“Hine/Horne Book Roundtable on Natanya Duncan’s An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” & “Advancing the Field: Cambridge Studies on Black Women in the United States,” for the 2024 Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), September 2024.
“Confronting Continuing Racism and Inequality in Women’s History Organizations,” International Federation for Research in Women’s History Conference, Sendagaya Campus-Tsuda University, Tokyo, Japan, August 2024.
“Hidden No More: Uncovering Black Women’s History Through National Parks,” American Historical Association, January 2024.
“Biographies of Black Women Roundtable," Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Summer 2023.
“The Power of Black Women's Biography," Organization of American Historians, Spring 2023.
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1-on-1: Expert highlights Mary Church Terrell's role in civil rights, education in DC
February 13, 2025 | Written by ABC 7News StaffFebruary is Black History Month, and 7News is speaking to experts about some noteworthy and historic African American figures that impacted the D.C. area. -
Uncovering Black histories at UD
February 03, 2025 | Written by Amy WolfA virtual tour ties previously overlooked histories to sites on campus. The Black Histories at UD StoryMap traces stories of Black community members, students, faculty members and racial justice activists to specific sites on the UD campus and the greater Newark area. -
Inspiring, radical ... racist: U.S. women’s clubs grapple with their tainted past
August 25, 2024 | Written by Alice Hutton of The GuardianMany 19th-century women’s clubs in the U.S. fought for civil rights, but in ways that were segregated. “Black women were either deliberately excluded or didn’t feel welcome,” said Alison Parker, a historian and expert in 19th-century women’s clubs at the University of Delaware.
