2020 FALL CONVOCATION SPEAKER

JELANI M. FAVORS, PH.D. ’97 Associate Professor of History, Clayton State University Award-winning author

Jelani M. Favors, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at Clayton State University. Favors has received major fellowships in support of his research that includes an appointment as a Humanities Writ Large Fellow at Duke University in 2013, and he was an inaugural recipient of the Mellon HBCU Fellowship at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke in 2009.

In 2014, Favors was invited to co-teach the course, “Citizenship and Freedom: The Civil Rights Era,” alongside Pulitzer Prize winning historian Taylor Branch at the University of Baltimore.

Favors’ essay, “Race Women: New Negro Politics and the Flowering of Radicalism at Bennett College, 1900-1945,” won the R.D.W. Connor Award as the best article published in the North Carolina Historical Review for 2018. The following year, his first book, “Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism,” was published by the University of North Carolina Press.

In 2020, “Shelter in a Time of Storm” received the Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award and the Southern Regional Council and University of Georgia Libraries’ Lillian Smith Book Award and was a finalist for the Pauli Murray Book Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society. His research and commentary have appeared in media outlets, including CNN, C-SPAN, The Washington Post, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Conversation.

Favors has a Ph.D. in history and an M.A. in African American studies from The Ohio State University, and a B.A. in history with honors from N.C. A&T. The Winston-Salem, North Carolina, native currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia.