Bianca Christel Williams (born 1980) is an American

cultural anthropologist Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term s ...

, feminist, author and academic, whose work centers on

black Americans African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...

. In November 2016, the

American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an American organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropo ...

and the

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

honored her with the AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology
Williams
is an associate professor of anthropology at

Graduate Center The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center) is a public university, public research institution and post-graduate university, postgraduate university in New York City. Formed in 1961 as Divi ...

of the City University of New York

Biography

Williams studied cultural anthropology at

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

, earning a B.A. in 2002, an M.A. in 2005 and a Ph.D. in 2009, as well as a Graduate Certificate in African and African American Studies. In 2009, she was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder where her courses included coverage of black women, civil rights, the black power movement and "the ethnography of American blackness." She encourages her students to read fiction, poetry and self-help books side-by-side with academic scholarship. In January 2017, she was promoted and received tenure in the Department of Anthropology at the University Colorado, and later that year she was hired as an associate professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. In 2018 she published ''The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism''. Williams describes her pedagogical approach in "Radical Honesty: Truth-telling as Pedagogy for Working through Shame in Academic Spaces", a chapter in "Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment" (May 2016) encouraging her students to challenge racist institutional traditions by overcoming shame and fostering change.

Selected publications

*Williams, Bianca C. (2018) ''The Pursuit of Happiness Black women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism''. Durham: Duke University Press. . . * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Williams, Bianca Living people 1980 births American anthropologists American women anthropologists African-American women writers African-American writers American writers African-American feminists American feminists University of Colorado Boulder faculty Duke University alumni 21st-century African-American academics 21st-century American academics 21st-century African-American women 20th-century African-American academics 20th-century American academics 20th-century African-American women 21st-century American women academics