Professor
Thomas C. Holt
University of Chicago
Historian; Educator
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
History
Elected
2003
Professor Thomas Cleveland Holt is the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. He is a scholar of African American history and has transformed the study by situating it in an international context that includes the Caribbean as well as the United States, and by locating freedom in a context of race-making. After graduating from Howard University with his B.A. and M.A., Holt would go on to teach at Howard, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the University of California, Berkeley, and now the University of Chicago and receive his Ph.D. from Yale University in American Studies. His work has received high recognition such as the Presidential Initiatives Award and Wilbur Cross Medal, as well as from the Southern Historical Association that awarded him the Charles S. Sydnor Prize to Holt's first book, which dealt with a comparable period in the American South after emancipation, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction. His study of Jamaica's economy, politics, and society after slavery, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, was awarded the Elsa Goveia Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians in 1995. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
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