Associate Professor, Department of History

Biography

Robert F. Jefferson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Fighting for Hope: African Americans and the Ninety-third Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), Brothers in Valor: The Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor (Lyons Press, 2018), and the editor of Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth Century America: Closing Ranks (Lexington Books, 2019). In 2019-2020, he was a Fulbright scholar in Denmark, where he was the Distinguished Chair of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense. In 2023-2024, he was a History and Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. His research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, disability, war and society studies in Twentieth Century United States history. He is currently completing a social history of the women and men who participated in the Officer Candidate Schools of the Second World War and a book about Mercer Cook and the American Society of African Culture during the Cold War.

Why Africana Studies?

Africana Studies is a spatially conceptualized and historically contingent field of study based on academic excellence and social responsibility. Africana Studies reflects the historical experiences of diaspora peoples of African descent in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas and the ways in which their experiences have contested, and reconfigured global systems grounded in racial and gender oppression, class antagonism, sexual otherness, ableism, and biases of modernity since the twelfth century. As a committed lifelong learner, devoted teacher, and staunch advocate of social change, my understanding of the complex inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary impulses inherent of Africana history are informed, invigorated, and sharpened by an ever-growing awareness of how these intersections have evolved over time.