Traci Parker

Dr. Traci Parker is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History at the University of California Davis.

Prior to working at UC Davis, she was an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies where she published her first book, "Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s," which was named a 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Dr. Parker is the co-editor of "The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience, and Justice." She is currently writing "Revolutionary Love" and editing a collection of essays on love, sex, and relationships in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States.

Her work has received the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute/Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among others.

Dr. Parker has been an on-air commentator and interviewed for her expertise for C-SPAN, CNN, PBS, and the History Channel, featured on a host of podcasts on African American history, civil rights, and consumer capitalism, and written for The American Historian, Black Perspectives, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun. She is on the Journal of American History’s editorial board; the Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award committee; the executive board of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians; the Massachusetts Historical Society’s African American History Seminar’s advisory board; The HistoryMakers’ Higher Education Advisory Board; and the Monadnock Media Inc.’s board of directors.

In 2022, Dr. Parker was conferred the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And, in 2017, she was award the Lilly Fellowship Program for Teaching Excellence from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Dr. Parker holds a PhD and MA from the University of Chicago and a BA in History from Cornell University.