The Department of American Culture and Literature is welcoming Nikki Lynne Marie Brown, associate professor of history at the University of New Orleans, as a Fulbright lecturer for the 2014 spring semester. The Fulbright Scholar Program, the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the US government, offers US faculty grants to lecture and conduct research in a wide variety of academic fields.
Dr. Brown earned her PhD in history at Yale University in 2001. Her first book, “Private Politics and Public Voices,” which focused on the history of African American women and World War I, won the Letitia Woods-Brown Award for the best book in African American women’s history in 2006.
She served as the managing editor of the “Jim Crow Encyclopedia,” published in 2008, which chronicles the system of racial segregation and discrimination in the United States from 1890 to 1965. She has written numerous entries on segregation and racism for “knowla.org,” the online encyclopedia of Louisiana.
Dr. Brown is also a professional photographer. An exhibition of her work is currently open to the public at the McKenna Museum of African American Art in New Orleans. Entitled “African American Men and New Orleans, 2010 to 2014,” the exhibition explores the experiences of working- and middle-class African American men as they work to rebuild their lives after Hurricane Katrina.
Dr. Brown will teach two courses in the department: AMER 492, “Gender Studies for American Culture,” and a new restricted elective, AMER 485, “Civil Rights and Black Power in American Studies.”