Violet Showers Johnson

Research Interests

Violet Showers Johnson is Professor of History at Texas A&M University. She received her BA (Honors in History) from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone; MA from the University of New Brunswick, Canada; and Ph.D. from Boston College. Prior to moving to Texas A&M University in 2012, she was a faculty member at Agnes Scott College, a women’s liberal arts college in Atlanta, where she also chaired the Department of History and served as the inaugural director of the Africana Studies Program, and the Women’s Global Leadership Center. At Texas A&M University, College Station, she has served as Director of Africana Studies, and Associate Dean for Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts. At Texas A&M University, Qatar, she has served as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Excellence and Development, and Interim Director of the Division of Arts and Sciences.

A naturalized American, born in West Africa and educated in West Africa and North America, Dr. Showers Johnson’s international personal and academic background has shaped much of her work as a teacher and scholar. She focuses on race, ethnicity, and immigration; African American history; African history; and the history of the African Diaspora. She has authored and co-authored books and articles on the Black immigrant experience in America. Her publications include The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900-1950 (Indiana University Press, 2006), with Marilyn Halter, African and American: West Africans in Post-Civil Rights America (NYU Press, 2014), and co-edited with Gundolf Graml and Patricia Williams Lessane, Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging, and Civil Rights (Liverpool University Press, 2018). She is currently completing a sole-authored monograph tentatively titled, Black While Foreign: The Complicated History of the Killing of Two African Immigrants in Late Twentieth-Century America.

Areas of Speciality

• Race, Ethnicity and Immigration
• Africa
• African Diaspora