Linda Heywood

Linda Heywood is a professor of African History and the History of the African Diaspora and African American 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. Her latest book is Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard University Press, 2017). 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 is presently a consultant to Henry Louis Gates new PBS series African Civilizations. Email: heywood@bu.edu