Welcome! My name is Jessica Ann Levy. I am a historian and author researching and writing about the history of the United States and the world with a focus on racial politics, corporations, and U.S. international relations. I have also researched and written on the history of Black mayors, Atlanta, and the anti-apartheid movement. I am currently Assistant Professor at Purchase College, State University of New York, where I teach courses on the history of modern America, U.S. foreign relations, the capitalism, and race and ethnicity.
My first book, Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics, traces Black empowerment’s rise in American politics—from early twentieth-century influences including Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey to the cities of postwar America—and across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa. Civil rights leaders, Black entrepreneurs, white corporate executives, and government officials all championed Black empowerment as a means of addressing multiple crises in US cities and to blunt some of the more radical aspects of the Black Power movement. Black empowerment politics likewise found application overseas in various Cold War efforts promoting American-style free enterprise in Africa. This was especially the case in South Africa, where US corporate executives and government officials wielded Black empowerment politics to oppose both apartheid and divestment.
By tracing Black empowerment politics’ evolution, Black Power, Inc. explains its popularity, championed by leaders from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela, while also revealing its role in expanding US corporate power, locally and globally.
I am currently working on several projects, including a co-edited volume, Capitalism & the American Century: Towards a Global History of Postwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming), with B. Alex Beasley, and a global history of General Motors, automobile industrialization, and post-colonial world-making in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I am also the author of numerous articles, essays, and opinion pieces for academic and popular publications, including the Washington Post, Public Seminar, and Black Perspectives. I co-hosts the popular WhoMakesCents? A History of Capitalism Podcast.
I am the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Library of Congress Kluge Center, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Hagley Library, and the German Historical Institute. My dissertation received the the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Betty Unterberger Dissertation Prize and the Business History Conference’s Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation.
I received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University and holds masters degrees from Johns Hopkins and The University of Chicago. Prior to teaching at Purchase, I held postdoctoral research associate positions in the Department of History and Democracy Initiative at the University of Virginia and in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Jessica Ann Levy 