Ashley Everson Awarded Prestigious Emerging Scholar Grant

Ashley Everson, an assistant professor in the Department of African American and Africana Studies (AAAS), was recently named a co-winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ (SHAFR) William Appleman Williams Emerging Scholar Grant.

These research grants are annually awarded to SHAFR members who received their Ph.D. less than six years ago. The goal of the grant is to help offset travel costs associated with the scholar’s U.S. foreign relations research.

As an awardee, Everson received $1,500 in support of her research project, “Voices of the Valley: Black Women, Radical Politics, and Internationalism in the Tennessee Valley, 1931–1950.”

Everson’s research seeks to highlight how, over a 20-year period, poor and working-class Black women living in the Tennessee Valley region—Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia—created a vision for democracy that had both a local and global impact.

“At the core of my work is highlighting how these women were foundational thinkers and activists who shaped Black political thought globally,” said Everson, who received her Ph.D. in African Studies from Brown University in 2025. “I am grateful for this recognition as I continue to recover these women’s transformative organizing and ideas.”

In so doing, Everson will be adding more perspectives to the body of research concerning the ideological, cultural and political movement for Black liberation, aka Black internationalism.

“This distinguished award recognizes Dr. Everson’s groundbreaking scholarship that centers Black women’s intellectual and political contributions within the broader history of the Black internationalist tradition. By foregrounding Black women as foundational thinkers and activists, her work demonstrates how their organizing and ideas shaped both global Black political thought and international political theory,” said Sharon Harley, AAAS professor and chair. “I am agreeably proud of the recognition that our newly-hired AAAS faculty member has received.”

Published on Fri, Feb 6, 2026 - 12:17PM