Title: Lorraine H. Morton Professor and Chair of African American Studies and Professor of History, Northwestern University
Biondi is the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of African American Studies and a professor of history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She earned her bachelor’s in history at Barnard College and Ph.D. in history at Columbia University. Biondi currently chairs the Department of African American Studies and has served in numerous capacities in the department and university. She is a scholar of modern African American history with a focus on Black radicalism, political thought and social movements. Biondi is the author of To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, the first book-length account of the Northern Civil Rights Movement, which has since become a thriving subfield in U.S. history. Harvard University Press awarded it the Thomas J. Wilson Prize as the best first book of the year. Her book The Black Revolution on Campus chronicling Black student movements of the late 1960s and fights for open admissions, affirmative action and Black studies, won the Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association for an outstanding book in African diaspora history. Biondi has served on the executive committee of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, of which she is a life member. She has written on the movement for reparations for slavery and segregation and participated in the successful campaign to win a landmark municipal ordinance in Chicago granting a package of reparations to survivors of police torture. Her current book project examines Black politics and gun violence, in Chicago and nationally, from the 1980s to the present.