Professor of African American & Black Diaspora Studies and History

Linda Heywood is a professor of African History and the History of the African Diaspora and African American & Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. She is the author of Contested Power in Angola, editor of and contributor to Central Africans Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, and co-author with John Thornton of Central African, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of America (Cambridge University Press, July, 2007) which was the winner of the 2008 Melville Herskovits Award for the Best Book published in African Studies. She is also one of the co-editors of the 2015 published book, African Americans in U.S. Foreign Policy: From the Era of Frederick Douglass to the Age of Obama (University of Illinois, Press, 2015). Her latest book is Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard University Press, 2017). Her articles on Angola and the African Diaspora have appeared in The Journal of African History, Journal of Modern African Studies, Slavery and Abolition, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. She has served as a consultant for numerous museum exhibitions, including African Voices (The Smithsonian Institution), Against Human Dignity (Maritime Museum), the exhibit on 17th on Africa at the Jamestown and Yorktown Settlement Victory Center, and the recently opened exhibit “Spirits of the Passage” at the Frazier History Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. She was also one of the history consultants and appeared in Henry Louis Gates PBS series African American Lives (2006) and Finding Oprah’s Roots (2007). She was a consultant for Henry Louis Gates PBS series Blacks in Latin America as well as The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. She was one of the major consultants of and appeared in Henry Louis Gates 2017 PBS series African Great Civilizations. She is a member of the Advisory Board, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is a consultant on the series Jamestown, Series II and III. She is also a Member of the 2019 Commemoration, AMERICAN EVOLUTION, Jamestown, Virginia. She is currently completing a manuscript on Njinga, History and Memory in the Angola, Europe and the African Diaspora.

CV here.