Jerry Gershenhorn

Jerry Gershenhorn is Julius L. Chambers Professor of History at North Carolina Central University. After earning a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in accounting at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Gershenhorn earned graduate degrees in history, an M.A. from North Carolina Central University, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research and teaching interests are American history, African American history, American Intellectual history, and North Carolina history. In 2004, he published Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (University of Nebraska Press). In Spring 2009, he was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. He appeared as an on-screen contributor and served as a consultant for the documentary film, "Herskovits at the Heart Of Blackness" (Vital Pictures, 2009). His second book, Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018. Louis Austin and the Carolina Times won the Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction, given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, in 2018.