Allida M. Black

Allida Black "is Project Director and Editor of The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, a project designed to preserve, teach and apply Eleanor Roosevelt's writings and discussions of human rights and democratic politics, and Research Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University.

"Professor Black is the recipient of the Millennium Medal from The George Washington University, the 2001 Person of Vision Award from the Arlington County Commission on the Status of Women, and the James A Jordan Award for Outstanding Dedication and Excellence in Teaching from Penn State University, Harrisburg. She has received the JNG Finley Postdoctoral Fellowship at George Mason University, a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution, as well as fellowships from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, the Harry Truman Foundation, and the United States Information Agency. She received her B.A. from Emory University in 1974, her Ph.D. from the George Washington University in 1993, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from DePaul University in 2001, and the University Medal from Roosevelt University in 2006.

"Professor Black's most recent book, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Volume I, The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948 was published in December 2006 by Charles Scribner's Sons. Her other publications include four books -- Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (Columbia University Press, November 1995); "What I Want to Leave Behind:" Democracy and the Selected Articles of Eleanor Roosevelt (Carlson Publishing, April 1995); Courage In A Dangerous World: The Political Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt (Columbia University Press, 1999); and with Jewel Fenzi, Democratic Women: An Oral History of the Women's National Democratic Club (WNDC Educational Foundation, 2000), as well as a variety of articles. Oxford University Press will publish Human Rights: Pages from History in 2008 and E.R.: Eleanor Roosevelt, Politics and the Dream of Democracy in 2009. Her biography of University of Tennessee basketball coach Pat Summitt, Reach for the Summitt: Pat Summitt and the Rise of Women's Basketball will be published by University of New Mexico Press in 2010.

"Outside the classroom, Dr. Black has written teachers' guides for PBS documentaries and served as an advisor to other documentaries prepared for PBS, the History Channel, A&E, and the Discovery Channel. She curated an exhibit honoring Eleanor Roosevelt's role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for United Nations' Beijing Plus 5 exhibit and an electronic exhibit on ER's political career for the Franklin D Roosevelt Library and Museum and the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. She serves on the academic advisory boards of the Sewall-Belmont House, H-Net New Deal, and H-Net Recent US. Each year she partners with the Women's Research and Education Institute to train congressional fellows to apply historical methods to the development and analysis of congressional human rights policy.

"Professor Black is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Foundation, the Center for New Deal Studies, secretary of the Gaea Foundation, and a director of the Liberian Education Trust, a project designed to rebuild the Liberian public school system, rehabilitate child soldiers, and provide literacy and numeracy training to market women. She lives in Arlington, Virginia where she just completed a two-year term on the county's Human Rights Commission."