Dr. Ousmane K Power-Greene is the E. Franklin Frazier Chair of Africana Studies and Professor of history at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He completed his Ph.D. in African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and his MFA in fiction at Columbia University. Over the course of his career, Professor Power-Greene’s scholarship has been recognized with various fellowships, most notably the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities’ sponsored scholar-in-residency program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. In 2022, Professor Power-Greene was elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society – one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and major independent research libraries. He’s been invited to lecture in universities and conferences all over the US, and abroad. Recently, he was invited to lecture at the American Academy in Rome where he presented a paper on Anti-Klan activism in the 1970s.

 

At Clark University, Professor Power-Greene co-organized an Africana Studies concentration, served on the President’s Commission on Race, and helped write the university’s Diversity and Inclusion requirement for undergraduate students. He was also one of the organizers of the Center for the Race, Gender, and Area Studies at Clark. In 2015, the Provost asked him to serve as interim Chief Officer of Diversity and Inclusion. That same year, the class of 2015 selected him to give the “Last Lecture” during graduation weekend. In 2023, Professor Power-Greene’s service with regard to Diversity and Inclusion at Clark was recognized with t’ President’s Achievement Award for Inclusive Excellence.

 

Professor Power-Greene has been featured on various media outlets, such as All Things Considered, CSPAN Book TV, and NPR’s history podcast Throughline for an episode on the legacy of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. In addition, he serves as a regular contributor on New England Public Radio show, The Fabulous 413. 

As Black Studies scholar and historian, Professor Power-Greene’s books include, Against Wind and Tide: African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement published by NYU Press in 2014 and In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, which he co-edited with Ronald A. Johnson, and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2021. His most recent book, An Uneasy Alliance: African Americans, the American Colonization Society, and Liberia is under contract with UNC Press.  In addition, to these scholarly works, Professor Power-Greene is a novelist.  His debut novel, The Confessions of Matthew Strong, was published by Other Press/Random House in 2022 and is rooted in fifteen years of research and writing about the history and legacy of white supremacy. The novel was a finalist for the New England Book Award and listed by NPR as a Best Book of 2022.

 

Beyond Clark, Professor Power-Greene has taught in a variety of educational settings, from secondary and high schools, such as Williston Northampton School and Amherst High to Hampshire College and Wuhan University in central China. He also teaches a US history each a Clemente Course in the Humanities at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Springfield and at the Holyoke Care-Center. The Clemente Course is a Mass Humanities-funded program designed to encourage adults from under-resourced communities to complete their college degrees. In addition, Professor

Power-Greene serves as a co-chair of Northampton’s reparations commission, is on the Board of Self-Evident Education and Apprentice Earth, a non-profit educational organization that supports the programing for Kindred Creative Residence + Agro-Forest a BIPOC led, LGBTQ+ welcoming space for creatives, educators, and activists committed to teaching sustainable living through regenerative agriculture, community outreach, and arts education.