Claudrena N. Harold

Associate Dean for Social Sciences and Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia, Claudrena N. Harold specializes in African American history, Black cultural politics, and labor history. 

The collaboration with UVA colleague Kevin Jerome Everson on two short films, Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) and Foosball: U. of Virginia Charlottesville, 1976 (2013) as part of the multimedia project Black Fire, supported by an Arts in Action grant were her debut film credits as co-director, writer and producer. Subsequent films reflecting Harold’s ongoing research into the history of Black student activism at UVA include We Demand (2016), Fastest Man in the State (2017), How Can I Ever Be Late (2017) Black Bus Stop (2019), Pride (2021) and Accidental Athlete (2023). These films have screened at numerous international film festivals and art institutions, including Chicago International Film Festival, Black Star, Berlinale, New York Film Festival,  IFFR, EMAF, IKFF Hamburg, Cinema du Reel, Doc Lisboa, BFI/London, Edinburgh, Porto Post Doc, Indie Memphis, AFI Fest, Crossroads Festival, Fronteira Festival Brazil, and have been featured at the Whitney Biennial, Harvard Film Archive, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Austrian Film Museum, mumok, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea. 

Claudrena is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942 (2007), which chronicles the history of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association from the perspective of black women and men living below the Mason-Dixon Line; New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2013) which details how the development of New Negro politics and thought was shaped by people, ideas, organizations, and movements rooted in the South, bringing into full view the ways southern blacks not only validated the idea of the New Negro as a national phenomenon but also significantly informed and reshaped the contours of black nationality and class formation; and When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (2020), an exploration into gospel music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves. She is the co-editor, with Louis Nelson of Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity (2018).