E. James West is a UK-based historian and writer. His work focuses on the modern United States, with a particular interest in popular history, race, media, and visual culture.He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020), A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2022), and Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022).
His writing has appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications, including African American Review, The American Historian, Black Perspectives, The Black Scholar, the Journal of American Studies, and the Washington Post. He had received fellowships from a range of major organisations and institutions, including the Fulbright Commission, the Leverhulme Trust, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the Library of Congress, and the British Library. He is currently working on several major projects. The first (under contract with Edinburgh University Press) is a survey history of the modern Black press in the United States. The second is a collection of letters to the editor from Black magazines. The third, provisionally titled Black History, Inc., explores the long and contested history of corporate engagement with and co-optation of the African American past. |
CONTACT
james.west@york.ac.uk | ejwestuk@gmail.com | @ejwestuk
