Adam Green

Co-Faculty Director, University of Chicago

Co-Faculty Director for University of Chicago, and Associate Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and History; Director of Graduate Studies, RDI

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Adam Green’s areas of research expertise include post-emancipation African American history, cultural studies, urban studies and intersectional critical race studies. His first book, Selling the Race: Culture and Community in Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (2006), is a widely cited analysis of Black cultural enterprise and creative exchange in modern Chicago. He is writing a second book, The Black Struggle for Happiness, which recovers ordinary narratives and archives of capability and ethical initiative among selected Black lives, as an argument for a situated legacy and practice of positive freedom and also editing a memoir of the 1960s and 1970s political leader, Sargent Shriver, on his tenure as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and relating it to the embattled course of anti-poverty policy up to the present day. An award-winning teacher, his classes interweave critical race and urban studies, apply methodologies of cultural contact to the representations of national identity, reorient post-Civil Rights Black cultural history from male icons to radical black feminism, and uncouple modern African American history from the progress narrative. A publicly and politically engaged thinker, he has served on the Illinois Humanities Council as a Board Member and more recently on the City of Chicago’s Advisory Committee on Monuments and Memorials. He was active in the movement for justice for survivors of Chicago Police Torture and, before that, in Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mother’s ROC) a police accountability organization in Los Angeles that served as an early abolitionist initiative in the 1990s. He is committed to collaborating with documentary filmmakers, journalists, and placemakers to advance critical historical understanding through mediums beyond the scholarly text.