Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history. Her recent work has focused on black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation in America. Her books include The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Pres, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009); and Traveling Black: A Social History of Segregated Transportation (forthcoming, Harvard University Press). She is also the co-author of a leading textbook on African-American history and the co-editor of two volumes of collected essays on the intellectual lives of Black women and race and consumption in America. Her work has been widely recognized and supported by leading scholarly organizations and foundations.
Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her public history work includes the exhibit “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation, 1876-1968,” an inaugural project of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she also advises the museum’s Civil Rights History Project. She also serves as a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress, and is on the boards of the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives Blog and the Journal of African American History, among others.
