Francille Wilson

Francille Rusan Wilson Grew up in segregated St. Louis before attending an integrated high school. She attended Wellesley College where she received a Bachelor’s Degree, before receiving a Master’s Degree from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is currently an intellectual and labor historian whose research examines the intersections between Black labor movements, Black social scientists, and Black women’s history during the Jim Crow era. She is Associate Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity, History, and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California and the Director of the Black Studies Initiative. Wilson was the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians, 2015-2018 and was a 2017-2018 fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her book, The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950, was awarded the 2007 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for the best book in Black women’s history. In 2023 the Association of African American Life and History awarded Wilson the Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion for her research, writing and activism.