Terrion L. Williamson
Associate Professor of Black Studies and Gender and Women's Studies; Director of the Black Midwest Initiative
About
Terrion L. Williamson is an associate professor of Black Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at UIC, where she also serves as the founding director of the Black Midwest Initiative. She is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (2017) and the editor of Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest (2020). Born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, her research attends broadly to working-class black life in the deindustrializing Midwest, with a particular emphasis on black women’s experiences of interpersonal harm and gender violence. Currently, she is working on a book about the deaths of nine black women who were killed in her hometown between 2003 and 2004.
Professor Williamson earned a B.A. from UIC, a J.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Her work has been supported by a range of funders, including the Ford Foundation, Humanities Without Walls, the American Association of University Women, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center.