Keisha N. Blain, professor of history and Africana studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has received the 2026 Lillian Smith Book Award from the University of Georgia Libraries for her latest book, Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025). The award-winning publication examines the pivotal contributions of Black women at the forefront of national and international movements for civil and human rights.
As a historian of the twentieth-century United States, Dr. Blain focuses her research on African American history, the modern African diaspora, and women’s gender and studies. In addition to Without Fear, Dr. Blain has published several edited volumes and books, including Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021).
At Brown, Dr. Blain holds affiliate appointments in American studies and the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. Earlier this year, she was named president of the Center for Engaged Scholarship, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting social science scholars whose work aims to foster a more democratic, more egalitarian, and more environmentally sustainable society in the United States. Dr. Blain also serves as editor-in-chief of Global Black Thought.
Dr. Blain is a magna cum laude graduate of Binghamton University in New York, where she received her bachelor’s degree in history and Africana studies. She earned both her master’s degree and her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. Before joining the Brown faculty in 2022, she taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Pittsburgh.