Robyn C. Spencer

Robyn C. Spencer is a historian whose research focuses on Black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She teaches survey and seminar courses on Black history at Lehman College and graduate level courses at the Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2018–2019 she was Visiting Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College. Her first book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland analyzes the organizational evolution of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. It was a finalist for the “Benjamin Hooks Institute National Book Award” sponsored by the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis and received Honorable Mention for the Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize sponsored by the Association of Black Women’s Historians. Her second book project: To Build the World Anew: Black Liberation Politics and the Movement Against the Vietnam War explores how and why the anti-imperialist struggle for Vietnamese independence became a rallying point for U.S.-based Black activists who were part of the freedom movement of the 1950s–1970s. This project was supported by a Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship at Yale University in 2016–2017, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society in 2018 and will be supported by an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science in 2020–2021. She is also working on two biographies of Black women, left theorist Patricia Robinson and Angela Davis, internationally acclaimed radical activist.