Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and has authored five books: Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Non-Fiction; and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, which was a New York Times Editor's pick, Best Social Science Books of 2021 by Library Journal, and one of Writer's Bone Best Books of 2021.
She was elected to the Society of American Historians, named a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected to the American Philosophical Society.
In addition to numerous teaching awards, her research has garnered fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University's Charles Warren Center, the University of Connecticut's Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, the University of Chicago's Pozen Center for Human Rights, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
She's been awarded the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University. She also was honored with the James W. C. Pennington Award from Heidelberg University (Germany). Professor Anderson has also been selected as a Presidential Scholar at Amherst College. In 2023 she was honored with the Ella Baker Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.
Professor Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department's Historical Advisory Committee; the Pulitzer Prize Committee for History; and the National Book Awards Committee in Non-fiction.
She earned her PhD in history from The Ohio State University.