Bianca Christel Williams

Bianca Williams is an American cultural anthropologist, feminist, author and academic, whose work centers on Black Americans. Dr. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the . She earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D from Duke University. She went on to earn a graduate certificate in African and African American Studies as well. She has researched extensively the emotional labor undertaken by black women, feminist pedagogies, black feminist leadership, and emotional labor in higher education workplaces.

She began teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder, with courses on civil rights, black women, 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.

She received tenure in 2017 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.

She has written several books, including ‘Don’t Ride the Bus!’ And Other Warnings Women Anthropologists are Given During Fieldwork, and most recently, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism, an examination of international travel as a vehicle for the pursuit of happiness. 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

Most recently, she is researching the emotional wellbeing and self-care efforts of black women working with the Movement for Black Lives. Williams was honored by the American Anthropological Association and Oxford University Press, which gave her the AAA/Oxford University Press Award, in recognition of her Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology.

Sources: The Graduate Center of the City University of New York Faculty Page for Bianca Williams and Bianca Williams’ Wikipedia Article.