Terrion L. Williamson (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Terrion L. Williamson is an associate professor of Black studies and Gender and Women’s studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she also serves as the founding director of the Black Midwest Initiative. She is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life and the editor of Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest. She is also coeditor, with Delia Fernández-Jones, of the University of Nebraska book series Reimagining Race and Region in the American Midwest. Born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, her research attends broadly to working-class Black life in the deindustrializing Midwest, with a particular emphasis on Black women’s experiences of interpersonal harm and gender violence. Currently, she is working on a book that centers the story of nine Black women who were killed in her hometown between 2003 and 2004.

Selected Publications

• Williamson, Terrion L. “Need That Tastes Like Destruction: Lessons from (the) Lorde on the Occasion of Black Death and Dying.” Feminist Studies 49, no. 2/3 (2023): 260–77.
• Williamson, Terrion L., ed. Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest. Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2020.
• Williamson, Terrion L. “Of Serial Murder and True Crime: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Black Feminist Research Praxis and the Implications of Settler Colonialism.” EPD: Society and Space 39, no. 1 (2021): 22–9.
• Williamson, Terrion L. “Why Did They Die? On Combahee and the Serialization of Black Death,” Souls 19, no. 3 (July–September 2017): 328–41.
• Williamson, Terrion L. Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.