Meet the Keynote Speaker

Barbara Harris Combs, J.D., Ph.D., is an award-winning scholar whose honors include the Ida B. Wells Barnett Book Award, the Kimberlé Crenshaw Best Article Award, and Georgia Sociologist of the Year. Dr. Combs currently serves as Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University. Combs is a humanist and interdisciplinary scholar who received her Ph.D. in Sociology with a concentration in race and urban studies from Georgia State University in 2010. She also holds a Juris Doctorate from The Ohio State University and an MA in English from Xavier University (Ohio). She brings this interdisciplinary background to her study of society. She serves on the Scholarly Advisory Board for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and she has also served as a facilitator of the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative’s 2022 and 2023 Anisfield Wolf Summer Seminars. Dr. Combs is the author of From Selma to Montgomery: The Long March to Freedom (Routledge, 2013) and Bodies Out of Place Theorizing Anti Blackness in U.S. Society (University of Georgia Press, 2022). A third book project, Black Places and Spaces of Political Empowerment, with co-authors Todd C. Shaw and Kirk Foster, is under contract with Oxford University Press. She has published in a variety of academic outlets, including Critical Sociology, Sociological Spectrum, American Behavioral Scientist, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, The New York Times (Room for Debate), and The Conversation. She loves people and books and is committed to racial/social equity.