A multi-methods scholar, Noliwe Rooks is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor in Africana Studies at Brown University, and the chair of Africana Studies. Her award-winning scholarship explores how education, beauty, race, and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history, and political life in the United States.
The author of six books and numerous articles, essays, and op-ed’s, the New York Public Library named Rooks’ latest book, Integrated: How Schools in America Failed Black Children as a Best Book in 2025, and she earned a 2025 NAACP Image Award nomination for nonfiction for her fifth monograph, A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune. In 2018, she earned an award for nonfiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation for Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education. She has received research funding from the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation among others. She lectures frequently at colleges and universities around the country and is a contributor to popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time Magazine and NPR.
Inducted into the Society of American Historians, and Morehouse College’s Society of Fellows in 2025, her most recent book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (Pantheon, 2025)is about how the implementation of integration/desegregation strategies impacted Black children and communities, and explores four generations of her family history with education in the United States.
