Biography

Dr. Kay Wright Lewis, Associate Professor, completed her PhD in the department of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in 2011. Her research focuses on slavery and abolition, African American intellectual history, Atlantic World history, and the history of violence. Lewis’ book, published by the University of Georgia Press, is entitled “A Curse Upon the Nation”: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. As a graduate student, Lewis held an Andrew W. Mellon Competitive Dissertation Fellowship at Rutgers University. After graduation, she was a Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University in 2011, and Lewis’ dissertation was one of the finalists in the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize competition. This year she is the recipient of a Mellon Scholars Short-term Fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia. And she received a Three Month Fellowship from the prestigious Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in New York City for her new research project tentatively entitled The Children of Africa Have Been Called. Lewis has presented at many national and international conferences and has taught at Rutgers University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Norfolk State University. She came to Howard University as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2017, and was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. From 2020 to 2023, she served as Director of Undergraduate Studies. From April 2023 to July 2024, she served as the Interim Chair of the Department of History.