Presidents

Current president, 2025-2026

Alex Lubin, Penn State University

Alex Lubin is a professor of African American Studies and History at Penn State University. His teaching and research are interdisciplinary and centered around transnational American Studies, racial capitalism, and Black radicalism. These concerns come together in scholarship on 20th century Black radicalism, with a particular focus on Black internationalism located in the Middle East and North Africa. He is also interested in the role of counterterrorism under racial capitalism. He is the author of Never-Ending War on Terror (UC Press, 2021), Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (UNC Press, 2014), and Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 (UP Mississippi, 2004). He is the co-editor (or editor) of Duse Mohamed Ali’s 1934 novel, Ere Roosevelt Came (Pluto Press, 2024, with Marina Bilbija), Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso Books, 2017, with Gaye Theresa Johnson), American Studies Encounters the Middle East (UNC Press, 2016, with Marwan Kraidy), Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left (UP Mississippi, 2007), and Setter Colonialism (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2008, with Alyosha Goldstein). His article, “American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine,” won the ASA’s Constance M. Rourke Prize in 2017.

Dr. Lubin earned undergraduate graduate and graduate degrees in American Studies and has been involved in American Studies program building for most of his career. He chaired the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico for six years and directed the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) for three years. While at AUB, he organized two international conferences and launched the first MA program in Transnational American Studies in the MENA region. A member of the American Studies Association since the 1990s, he co-founded the Caucus on Community and Academic Activism and has been a member of several ASA committees, including the International Committee, the Conference Program Committee, the Committee on American Studies Departments, Programs, and Centers, the John Hope Franklin Prize committee, and the Constance M. Rourke Prize committee. 

His current research studies the African American presence in Cairo, Egypt during the height of the Third World movement, employing the concept of ensemble to understand how discordant histories linked and harmonized under the banner of non-alignment between 1957-1967. 

President-Elect, 2025-2026

Tanisha Ford, CUNY Graduate Center

Tanisha Ford is a professor of History; Black, Race & Ethnic Studies; and Biography & Memoir at The Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2011, she earned a Ph.D. in twentieth-century U.S. history, with minor fields in African diaspora history and transnational American studies. Before joining the Graduate Center, she held faculty positions in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. 

She considers herself an interdisciplinary historian, with research and teaching curiosities that reflect her eclectic imagination: African diasporic social movements, material and visual cultures, critical philanthropic studies, and life writing. 

She is author of four books: Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2023), which won an NAACP Image Award, the Hooks National Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the OAH Darlene Clark Hine Award; Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (St. Martin’s, 2019); Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019, with Kwame Brathwaite and Deborah Willis); and Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015), winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Southern History, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Black Scholar, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. She has also written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, and Harper’s Bazaar. Currently, she is completing an experimental biography of sculptor Augusta Savage. 

Her research has been supported by institutions including New America/Emerson Collective, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the School of Advanced Study (London, UK).

She has been engaged in service to the profession since graduate school, when she was an Organization of American Historians Diversity Fellow. Working closely with OAH staff, she helped plan the annual national conference, staffed the ALANA committee on the status of scholars of color, and helped organize the community college initiative. Her work with the OAH—during its most progressive era—continues to guide Her approach to institution building. She is a co-founder of the Black Women’s Biography Collective and TEXTURES, a working group on the material culture of global Black migration. She has co-organized conferences and symposia, including “UnBioed: Radically Reimagining Black Women’s Lives” at the University of Kentucky, “Writing and Publishing Black Women’s Biography” at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the “HBCU Material Culture Conference” at Dillard University. She was the director of the University of Delaware’s African American Public Humanities Initiative and chair of the Association of Black Women Historians nominating committee. She has served on the editorial advisory boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly, Fashion Studies, and UNC Press’s “Black Women’s History” Series. She currently serves on the advisory committees of the American Museum of Natural History’s Ice Cold exhibition and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s African American Fundraising Collecting Initiative. 

Immediate Past-President, 2025-2026

Mishuana Goeman, University at Buffalo

Mishuana Goeman, daughter of enrolled Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan, is currently a Professor of Indigenous Studies at University of Buffalo (on leave from UCLA’s Gender Studies and American Indian Studies), served as ASA President from 2024-2025. Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press) in Fall 2023. She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021) which won the Choice award in 2021. Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as Co-PI on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities.  Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She is the PI of the University of California President’s Office’s multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times. She also headed up the Mukurtu California Native Hub (2021) housed at UCLA through an NEH sub-grant, which supports local tribal organizations and nations to start their cultural heritage and language digitally sovereign sites through the Mukurtu platform. She is also a co-pi on the Haudenosaunee Archive, Repository of Knowledge, a Mellon-funded project at the University at Buffalo.