Quincy T. Mills

Quincy T. Mills earned his doctorate in history from the University of Chicago in 2006. Prior to arriving at Maryland, he was a faculty member at Vassar College. Mills specializes in 20th-century African American business and social movement history. In 2013, he was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He has discussed his research on media outlets such as NPR and MSNBC. He is currently working on a new book entitled “The Wages of Resistance: Financing the Black Freedom Movement.”

Mills hosts the Anna Julia Cooper Workshop Series in the Department of History. Anna Julia Cooper was the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in History, taught and mentored scores of students in D.C., and made invaluable contributions to Black intellectual life. The Cooper Workshop will feature scholars from various disciplines researching and writing on Black history in the United States and the world. We use “Black” to embrace the expansiveness of African America and attend to the long tradition of black internationalism.  With the conviction that “all knowledge is incremental and collective,” as David Levering Lewis once wrote, the Workshop aims to foster a supportive space for the engagement and production of scholarship in African American history. As a works-in-progress series, we discuss precirculated, unpublished papers. The Workshop draws an interdisciplinary community from the area with expertise in a wide reach of the field.