Allida Black

Allida Black is a distinguished visiting scholar at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, and an affiliated scholar with the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. She also serves as managing director of the Allenswood Group, LLC, a collaborative she founded to preserve and document women’s political history and strengthen democracy through education and civic engagement.

Black is recognized as a leading expert on Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She has written and edited 10 books as well as a variety of articles on women, politics, and human rights policy; led workshops around the world on human rights, conflict resolution, and women's and girls' empowerment; curated exhibits on human rights for presidential libraries and other renowned repositories; and received awards from three universities for her commitment to students and her teaching. In 2022, Heartland Alliance International recognized her leadership with the Robert H. Kirschner Award for Global Activism.

Black has advised former Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on archival, oral history, and other matters since 2006. In 2017, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asked Black to serve as her historian and advise her on her archive, oral history project, and other special initiatives.

Black’s other projects include “In the Shadow of 9/11: The Bipartisan Legislative Effort to Rebuild and Restore Lower Manhattan,” a Hewlett Foundation-funded legislative case study for American University’s Center for Political Negotiation; an upcoming initiative on China and the global women’s movement for the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security; and an Oxford University-led reconstruction of the Good Friday Agreement negotiations.

She is a trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, an advisor to the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and Democracy and the National Women’s History Museum, and a director of the Campaign School at Yale, the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Survivors of Torture, the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Foundation, the Kilimanjaro Centre for Community Ophthalmology, and the University of Mary Washington.

Black received her PhD from the George Washington University, where she serves as editor emeritus of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project and research professor of history and international affairs.