Allyson Hobbs

Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor of United States History, the Director of African and African American Studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is a contributing writer to The NewYorker.com and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians . Her work h... as appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Root.com, The Guardian, Politico, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC and National Public Radio. In 2017, she was honored by the Silicon Valley chapter of the NAACP with a Freedom Fighter Award. She has served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Allysons first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Organization of American Historians Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. The book was also selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014, a Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014 by The Root, a featured book in the New York Times Book Review Paperback Row in 2016, and a Paris Review What Our Writers are Reading This Summer Selection in 2017. Allyson is currently at work on two books, both forthcoming from Penguin Press. Nowhere to Run: African American Travel in Twentieth-Century America explores the humiliation and indignities as well as the joy, exhilaration, and freedom that African American motorists experienced on the road and To Tell the Terrible, which examines the collective memory of sexual violence among generations of black women.Read More