Today’s conversation is with Mia Bay, Paul Mellon Professor of American History at University of Cambridge. Mia Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history. A graduate of University of Toronto, she completed her post graduate studies at Yale University under the supervision of David Brion Davis. In recent years, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History, and before that she taught at Rutgers University, where she also directed the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity.

Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), which also received a PROSE Award for Excellence in American History, the OAH’s Liberty Legacy Award, the Lillian Smith book Award, the Order of the Coif Book Award and the  David J, Langum Prize in Legal History. Her other works include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014). She is also the co-author, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2012, 1st Edition, 2016, 2nd Edition), and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line( Rutgers University Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.  

Bay’s current projects include a new book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson. Her work has been supported by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Fletcher Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello; the American Council of Learned Societies, Boston University’s Institute on Race and Social Division, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and W.E.B. Du Bois Centers; and the American Historical Association. An Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, Bay is a member of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s advisory board and serves on the editorial boards of Reviews in American History, the Journal of African American History, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives Blog.  

Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits– “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968”– and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project.