Bianca C. Williams

Bianca C. Williams (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women & Gender Studies, and Critical Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She earned a graduate certificate in African & African American Studies and her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Her research interests include Black women, travel, and emotional wellness; race, gender, and equity in higher education; and Black feminist pedagogical and organizing practices. The investigative thread that binds Williams’ organizing, teaching, and research is the question “How do Black people develop strategies for enduring and resisting the effects of racism and sexism, while attempting to maintain emotional wellness?”

In her award-winning book The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism, Williams argues that pursuing happiness is a political project for Black women, while examining how African American women use travel to Jamaica and the Internet as tools for escaping U.S. racism and sexism. She is co-editor of Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education with Dian Squire and Frank Tuitt.

Additionally, Williams has written about “radical honesty” as feminist inclusive pedagogy in Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment, and published in the journals Souls, Cultural Anthropology, Teachers College Record, and on the blogs Anthrodendum and Anthropoliteia. She is a recipient of the American Anthropological Association & Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. Finally, Williams is Faculty Lead of the PublicsLab at The Graduate Center. Here, she and Director Stacy Hartman encourage graduate students and faculty to think broadly about the utility of public scholarship in a variety of careers, and reimagine doctoral education as a process of wellness and wholeness.

Select Publications:

Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education, co-edited with Dian Squire and Frank Tuitt, SUNY 2021.

The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism, Duke U Press 2018.

“Introduction #BlackLivesMatter,” Cultural Anthropology series on #BlackLivesMatter: Anti-Black Racism, Police Violence, and Resistance, 2015.

Video Interview about The Pursuit of Happiness,” Left of Black with Mark Anthony Neal, 2018.