Amanda Joyce Hall

Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
I am historian of twentieth-century social movements with a specialization in Black internationalism, transnational movements, and radical organizing throughout North America, Africa, and the broader Black world. I am interested in conceptual and political histories of anti-apartheid, decolonization, African diaspora, Blackness and Black consciousness, anti-colonialism, and abolition.

I earned my doctorate in History and African American Studies from Yale University in 2022 where I was awarded the Sylvia Ardyn Boone prize for best dissertation in African and African American art and culture. I was formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University, a dissertation fellow in UCSB’s Department of Black Studies, and a History Workshop fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. I hold master’s degrees in International and World History from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, where I wrote my thesis on the international student anti-apartheid movement. I also earned a master’s degree in Education from Fordham University in New York City, where I worked as a special education teacher for the U.S. Department of Education at a middle school in the South Bronx. I received my AB in Classics and International Studies from Dartmouth College in 2011.

My research has been supported by the Black Studies Department at Northwestern University, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Black Metropolis Research Center, the Newcombe Foundation at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the UCSB Department of Black Studies, the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) as well as the History Department, the African American Studies Department, the MacMillan Center, and International Security Studies at Yale University.

Since 2020, I have been a host of the New Books in African American Studies podcast channel on the New Books Network.