Lois Brown is an ASU Foundation Professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Arizona State University. She is a public historian and a scholar of African American literature and culture known for groundbreaking research that deepens our understanding of place, race, class, gender, faith, and imagination in America.
As a Center director, Brown focuses on programming, research and civic engagement initiatives that enable productive and revelatory considerations of fields such as education, public history, the arts, law and the environment. Brown leads the Center's multi-faceted efforts to advance positive systemic change, intensify creative thinking and strengthen interdisciplinary knowledge exchange.
Lois Brown earned her A.B. degree in English from Duke and her Ph.D. in English from Boston College. Her first academic love is 17th century British poetry and this continues to inform her work on early American writing, landscape, and narratives about loss, redemption, and triumph. Her books include "Black Daughter of the Revolution: A Literary Biography of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins," "Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar" and "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance." Professor Brown’s current projects include biographies of influential but understudied African American women of the nineteenth century, African Americans in 18th- and 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts and a collection of essays on race, place and history in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Arizona.
Brown is a featured scholar in Henry David Thoreau, the documentary co-directed by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers and executive produced by Ken Burns and Don Henley that aired in March 2026. She was featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary The Abolitionists and contributed to the Emmy Award-winning AZ PBS documentary Blacks In Arizona. She also has curated and collaborated on exhibitions for the Museum of African American History in Boston, the Boston Public Library and the Robbins House of Concord, Massachusetts.
Brown is an award-winning teacher whose courses focus on topics such as American women writers, memoir and short stories, the American pastoral imagination and African American film.