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Kimberly Springer is a writer and scholar-activist interested in social movements, digital culture, politics, and the arts. She earned her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and sociology from the University of Michigan and her doctorate in women’s studies from Emory University. From 1999-2001 she was the Williams College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies. She’s delighted to return to Williams after teaching for the past five years in the American Studies Department at King’s College London in the U.K.

Springer has written extensively on gender, race, sexuality, and digital culture for academic and popular press outlets, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism; Cercles: revue pluridisciplinaire du monde Anglophone; Ms. Magazine; and the Journal of Women’s History. Her monographs and anthologies include Stories of O: The Oprahfication of American Culture, co-edited with Trystan Cotten (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming 2010); Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Duke University Press, 2005); and Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary African American Women’s Activism, editor (New York University Press, 1999).

Her writings on black feminism, film, and sexuality have appeared in a number of edited volumes, including Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, eds. Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti (Seal Press, 2009); Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Contemporary Culture, eds. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Duke University Press, October 2007); Feminist Television Reader: A Reader (Oxford Television Studies), eds. Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel (McGraw Hill and Open University Press, 2nd edition, 2007); Black Power Studies: Rethinking the Civil Rights and Black Power Eras, ed. Peniel Joseph (Routledge, 2006); and Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in Film, ed. Martha McCaughey and Neal King (University of Texas Press, 2001).

Her work also extends to media production, including academic consulting for documentary film, radio production, and new media. She has been a columnist and blogger for Shiny Shiny: a Girl’s Guide to Gadgets; PopMatters: an international magazine of cultural criticism; and Sexing the Political: an online journal of Third Wave Sexuality. Radio productions include scriptwriting and associate producing for the Peabody Award-winning "Will the Circle Be Unbroken: A Personal History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Communities"; producer for WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s "The Good Fight: a Look at Progressive Activism" (RTNDA’s Murrow Award for Best Regional Series 2001); and guest on NPR’s The Tavis Smiley Show reading her essay, "Talking White," from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories.

During her time at Williams as the Sterling Brown Visiting Professor of Africana Studies, she will teach "Blackness 2.0: Race and New Technologies." Her research will focus on her next monograph, which examines the transferral of 1960s and1970s social movement values through the television producer Norman Lear’s sitcoms. She will also be conducting research in the area’s archives for a volume of Shirley Chisholm’s political writings.