Biography

Krista Johnson is Professor and Director of the Center for African Studies at Howard University. She is also co-convenor of the HU Women and Gender Studies Collective. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University and has published on a wide range of topics including health policy, gender and HIV prevention, global health governance in Africa, and race and racism in international relations. Johnson specializes in African politics witha particular focus on social movements and health policy in sub-Saharan Africa

She has lived and traveled extensively throughout southern Africa, completed a Fulbright Fellowship in 2012 at the Centre for the Study of HIV and AIDS at the University of Botswana, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape. In 2019 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to conduct research for her upcoming book on The “Howard School” and early African-American scholars in the field of International Relations. She completed a fellowship with the Dresher Center for the Humanities at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2021. She was also awarded a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship for 2021 in partnership with the Institute of Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg.