Françoise N. Hamlin is associate professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University and an award-winning teacher, mentor, and author. Her first monograph, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Book Award. A book she coedited, These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship, was a finalist for the QBR 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction. Most recently, “Historians and Ethics: Finding Anne Moody,” published in the American Historical Review (April 2020), won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.
Hamlin’s most notable awards and research fellowships include: the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize (Southern Historical Association); the Franklin L. Riley Dissertation Prize (Mississippi Historical Society); the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Fellowship (University of Michigan); the Charles Warren Center Fellowship (Harvard University); a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship; and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, in addition to major mentoring and teaching awards at Brown University for her dedicated work providing holistic advising, teaching, and mentoring.
Her project, “Freedom’s Cost: Children and Youth in the Black Freedom Struggle,” studies young people’s risk, trauma, and resiliency during the civil rights movement as they pursued constitutionally given rights, justice, and equality. Freedom is never free.
