Ronald Williams II (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Ronald Williams II is an independent scholar and writer with broad interests in African American and African Diaspora history and politics and the history of US foreign relations. He was previously a member of the full-time faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he taught courses in history, politics, and public policy in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies. His current book project is an institutional history of the African American foreign policy advocacy organization TransAfrica. Drawing on extensive archival research and more than 100 original interviews, the book is tentatively titled Black Embassy: TransAfrica and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice and was selected for a 2024 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant. A native of Oakland, California, Ronald lives in Durham, North Carolina with his daughters, Zora and Macy. He holds a PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Selected Publications

• Williams II, Ronald. “The New Negro in African American Politics: Barack Obama and the Politics of Racial Representation.” In The Obama Phenomenon: Toward a Multiracial Democracy, edited by Charles P. Henry, Robert L. Allen, and Robert Chrisman, 200–16. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
• Williams II, Ronald. “From Anti-Colonialism to Anti-Apartheid: African American Political Organizations and African Liberation, 1957–1993.” In African Americans and Global Affairs: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Michael Clemons, 65–89. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2010.
• Williams II, Ronald. “Barack Obama and the Complicated Boundaries of Blackness.” Black Scholar 38, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 55–61.