Frank Guridy

Frank Andre Guridy is the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is also Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of social movements. His next book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024), is a history of the American stadium as a community institution that illustrates the central role it has played in American social and political life. He is also the author of The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021). Guridy is a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and in other parts of the African Diaspora. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr.

Guridy’s writing and commentary on sport, society, and politics have been published in Public Books, Columbia News, NBC News.com and the Washington Post. His fellowships and awards include the Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Ray A. Billington Professorship in American History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library. He is also an award-winning teacher, receiving the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, and the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia in 2019. He also won Columbia’s Faculty Service Award in the spring of 2023. He is beginning a new project on the ascendance of Yannick Noah, the Black French tennis star, and the politics of race, immigration, and empire in France during the 1970s and 1980s.