Allison Mitchell

Biography

Allison Mashell Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Civil Rights Studies in the Departments of Africana Studies and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Mitchell received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. She received her BA in History and African American Studies at the University of Florida. Her general research interests include African American history, oral history, civil rights studies, political and social movements, and grassroots organizing.

Mitchell's current research project analyzes the role of Black Americans in Florida in political realignment in the South beginning after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright ruling. She challenges the traditional periodization and white American-centered narratives of political realignment scholarship by emphasizing points of contention in state-level and Southern politics that reveal the inherent limitations of the U.S. two-party system. Her work has been supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, and the Richards Civil War Center and Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Mitchell is an avid supporter of public-facing scholarship. Her work has appeared in TIME Magazine. Additionally, her essay, “The Children of the Mississippi Freedom Summer,” was featured in the edited volume Picturing Black History.