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Violet Showers Johnson

Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Qatar
Professor
Areas of Speciality
  • Race, Ethnicity and Immigration
  • Africa
  • African Diaspora
Contact
  • vmjohnson@tamu.edu
  • Melbern G. Glasscock Building, 302
Professional Links
Education
Ph.D. Boston College 1992

Research Interests

Violet Showers Johnson was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and grew up in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, West Africa. She received her BA (Honors in History) from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone; MA from the University of New Brunswick, Canada; and Ph.D. from Boston College. She taught at Fourah Bay College before coming to the United States in 1985 on a Fulbright scholarship. After twenty years at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, she moved to Texas A&M University in July 2012. She served as Director of the Africana Studies Program from 2012 to 2017, and Associate Dean for Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts from 2017 to 2022. She is currently Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development, and Professor of History in the Division of Arts and Sciences, Texas A&M University, Qatar. A naturalized American, Johnson’s international personal and academic background has shaped much of her work as a teacher and scholar. She focuses on race, ethnicity and immigration, African American history, African history, and the history of the African Diaspora. She has written extensively on the Black immigrant experience in America. Her publications include The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston (Indiana University Press, 2006); “What, then, is the African American? African and Afro-Caribbean Identities in Black America” (Journal of American Ethnic History, 2008); with Marilyn Halter, African & American: West Africans in Post-Civil Rights America (NYU Press, 2014). She served as lead editor for a volume of essays entitled Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging, and Civil Rights (Liverpool University Press, 2018). Dr. Johnson is currently working on a single authored monograph tentatively titled “Black While Foreign: African, Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and Race and Racism in Late Twentieth-Century America.” She is president of the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR), a professional academic organization based in Europe.

Publications

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles

 

 

 

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging and Civil Rights (Liverpool University Press, 2018)

 

African & American: West Africans in Post-Civil Rights America

 

 

African & American: West Africans in Post-Civil Rights America (NYU Press, 2014)

 

 

 

Western Fictions, Black Realities: Meanings of Blackness and Modernities

 

 

Western Fictions, Black Realities: Meanings of Blackness and Modernities (Lit Verlag and Michigan State University Press, 2011)

 

 

 

The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900-1950

 

 

 

The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900-1950, Blacks in the Diaspora Series (Indiana University Press, 2006)