Associate Professor of History, Afroamerican and African Studies
About
Matthew J. Countryman is Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and of History at the University of Michigan. Countryman is the author of Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia which won the 2006 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book in civil rights history from the Organization of American Historians. Countryman’s other publications include "'From Protest to Politics': Community Control and the Emergence of Independent Black Politics in Philadelphia, 1965-1981," in the Journal of Urban History, and “2020 Uprisings, Unprecedented in Scope, Join a Long River of Struggle in America,” in the online magazine, The Conversation.
Countryman is a founding member of the Black Washtenaw County Collaboratory, a community-campus collaboration dedicated to documenting and recounting histories of racial segregation and African American community building in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan. He has also served as a consulting historian for the public history website, “Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia.”
From 2018 to 2023, Countryman served as Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. Previously, he served for 11 years as the Faculty Director of the Rackham Program in Public Scholarship, a co-curricular training program in community engagement for graduate students. He is the recipient of the John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring and the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award.
Affiliation(s)
- Faculty: Department of History
- Faculty: Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
Field(s) of Study
- African American social movements, 20th-century U.S. history, race, liberalism and the American left, African-American politics in the post-civil-rights era.
- Secondary Fields of Study: Public memory of the Civil Rights movement, the social construction of race.
