College of Humanities & Sciences

Education

PhD (2011) in History, Harvard University

Biographical Statement

Adam Ewing received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2011. Before joining the Department of African American Studies at VCU in 2014, he served as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2011-2013), and Mellon Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University (2013-2014).

Research Interests

Dr. Ewing’s work focuses on the historical dynamics of power, identity, and political mobilization in the African diaspora. His first book, The Age of Garvey, examines the spread and articulation of Garveyism—the race first politics spearheaded by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey—across the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa in the years following World War I. The book is the recipient of the 2015 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Dr. Ewing is currently working on three book projects: his second monograph, a global history of Pan-Africanism; Global Garveyism, and edited collection of essays charting the global reach and importance of Garveyism (with Ronald Stephens); and an untitled project compiling the collected writings of Robert A. Hill, the legendary scholar of the Pan-African tradition.

Representative Publications

The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

“Lying Up a Nation: Zora Neale Hurston and the Local Uses of Diaspora.” Callaloo 37, no. 1 (2014): 130-147.

“Caribbean Labour Politics in the Age of Garvey, 1918-1938.” Race & Class, 55, no. 1 (2013): 23-45.

“Garvey or Garveyism?: Colin Grant’s Negro With a Hat (2008) and the Search for a New Synthesis in UNIA Scholarship.”Transition 105 (2011): 130-145.

Recent Courses

Africana Social and Political Thought
Ferguson, USA: Race and Criminal Justice in Historical Perspective
Pan-Africanism: From the Age of Revolution to #BlackLivesMatter