Jonathan Jasper Wright Institute for the Study of Southern African American History, Culture and Policy
Director:
Dr. Brian Johnson is Associate Professor of English at Claflin University and Director, The Jonathan Jasper Wright Institute for the Study of Southern African American History, Culture and Policy. He received his B.A. in English from The Honors College, Johnson C. Smith University (1995), and his M.A. in English from The University of Wisconsin-Madison (1998). He earned his Ph.D. in English from The University of South Carolina at Columbia (2003). In 2005, Dr. Johnson published his first book, Du Bois on Reform: Periodical-Based Leadership for African Americans. His recent scholarship includes a second book, W.E.B. Du Bois: Agnostic (a biography) which is under contract with Rowman and Littlefield, three co-edited volumes in the Conflicts in American History series under contract with ABL-CLIO entitled “Civil War and Reconstruction,” “The Long Civil Rights Movement” and “Towards the Next American Century” and finally he has served as an African American literature consultant to the Modern Critical Views Series and will be published by Chelsea House. He has held a Non-Resident Fellowship appointment within The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African/African American Research at Harvard University (2004-2005), and a Lilly/Center for Christian Studies Fellowship at Gordon College (2005-2007). Most recently, Dr. Johnson was one of 20 Fellows selected nationally to receive a (2006-2007) Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation/Career Enhancement Fellowship, which provides a sabbatical year fellowship for the academic year, and he has been named “The Civic Engagement Scholar” within the J. McDonald Williams Institute ( Dallas, Texas) where he will serve a two-year non-resident term. He and his wife Shemeka have two sons, Brian Asa and Nathan Morgan Qodesh.
