Gaye Theresa Johnson

Gaye Theresa Johnson is a Professor of African American Studies and Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. At UCLA she is also the Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee for the Ralph J. Bunche Center for Research in African American Studies and Vice Chair of the Department of African American Studies.  She has been a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University and at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, and she writes and teaches on race and racism, cultural politics, and freedom struggles. Her first book, entitled Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles was published with the University of California Press in 2013 and is a history of civil rights and spatial struggles among Black and Brown freedom seekers in LA from 1940-2010. Johnson’s second book, co-edited with Alex Lubin, was released by Verso Press in August 2017, is titled Futures of Black Radicalism.  With endorsements by Cornel West and Harry Belafonte, the book was released to wide acclaim, and featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. She is currently writing a book under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, scheduled for release next year, titled Let’s Get Free:  Artists on Activism in the 21st Century.  Johnson is President of the Board of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), and an advisory board member for the Goldin Institute and the Rosenberg Fund for Children.