Associate Professor
Gaye Theresa Johnson is Associate Professor of Black Studies and the Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at UCSB. A historian of freedom struggles and cultural politics, she is also a lead facilitator and trainer in healing justice for movement collectives across the nation. Among her many publications are Futures of Black Radicalism, co-edited with Alex Lubin (Verso Press); Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement (UC Press); and Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion, with sports scholars David J. Leonard and Rodolfo Mondragón (University of Illinois Press). She has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has received numerous awards for community-engaged research and teaching.
Johnson is a community-engaged scholar and an advocate for grassroots organizing, primarily in farmworkers’ rights, reproductive justice, and housing justice.
Johnson's proudest achievement is being a mother and a part of the circle of friends and family that constitute the core of her life.