​Johanna Fernández

Johanna Fernández teaches 20th-Century U.S. History and the history of social movements in the Department of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Dr. Fernández is currently completing a history of the Young Lords titled, When the World Was Their Stage: A History of the Young Lords Party, 1969–1976 (2017). In her capacity as an historian Professor Fernández filed a lawsuit against the NYPD in 2014, for its failure to release to her surveillance records of the Young Lords. In June 2016, her suit led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records of New York activists, dating back to 1905. In 2015, the exhibition project she co-curated,¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York was cited by the New York Times as one of the Top 10, Best In Art of that year. Fernández has received numerous awards, including the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship of the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. Professor Fernández is the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015). With Mumia Abu-Jamal she co-edited a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy, titled The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor (Routledge, 2014).  She is the writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Big Noise Films, 2010).