Dr. Jelani M. Favors is the Henry E. Frye Distinguished Professor of History and the Interim Director of the Center of Excellence for Social Justice at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He is a passionate educator and an award-winning scholar who is widely considered one of the most prominent authorities on the history of Black colleges and universities. He has received major fellowships in support of his research that includes an appointment as a Humanities Writ Large Fellow at Duke University in 2013, and he was an inaugural recipient of the Mellon HBCU Fellowship at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke in 2009.

In 2019, Favors released his first book entitled Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press. The book received high praise from reviewers and reset the narrative on the legacy of Black colleges as incubators of student activism and leadership. Shelter in a Time of Storm was the recipient of the 2020 Stone Book Award, the most coveted and prestigious honor recognizing literary works in the field of African American history and culture. The prize is presented annually by the Museum of African American History in Boston. Shelter in a Time of Storm was also the recipient of the 2020 Lillian Smith Book Award given yearly by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries. The Lillian Smith is the oldest and best-known book award in the south and it recognizes authors who “elucidate conditions of racial and social inequity and propose a vision of justice and human understanding.” Shelter in a Time of Storm was also one of five finalists for the 2020 Pauli Murray Book Prize presented by the African American Intellectual History Society.

The critical reviews and reception of Shelter in a Time of Storm were nothing short of outstanding. The Journal of American History noted the book was “Well documented and richly detailed,” and “an important contribution to a comprehensive understanding of the long struggle for civil rights.” The American Historical Review declared the book “A tour de force…By recovering the legacy of HBCUs in fostering generations of leadership and activism, Shelter in a Time of Storm offers a bold vision of the role that black colleges can still play for today’s generation of college students and the issues they—and the rest of American society—currently face."Leading educational historian James Anderson noted that Favors “has written the most profound, thorough, and nuanced work ever on the role of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in educating and developing generations of the Black student activists who shaped and reshaped the long struggle for freedom and equality.”

In 2021, Florida A&M University adopted Shelter in a Time of Storm as its common read book for its class of 2025, and it has since been readopted for the class of 2026 and 2027. In 2022, Tougaloo College also adopted the book as its common read for first year students. Favors’s scholarship continues to make strides in documenting the legacy and critical importance of historically Black colleges and universities. Most recently he has joined with a team of other award-winning scholars to edit the first encyclopedia volume to document the history of all of America’s HBCUs entitled Historically Black Colleges and Universities: An Encyclopedia. The edited volume is under contract and the publication date is forthcoming.

In 2018, Dr. Favors’s essay entitled “Race Women: New Negro Politics and the Flowering of Radicalism at Bennett College, 1900-1945,” won the R.D.W. Connor Award as the best article published in the North Carolina Historical Review for that year. His published work has been featured in Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (John Hopkins University Press, 2013), which was recognized as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine. He has also published an essay in Ted Ownby’s The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi, 2013). Favors’s commentary has appeared in various online blogs with his most recent work published by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in October of 2022.

Dr. Favors has impacted public discourse as well. His commentary and research have appeared in several publications and media outlets, including CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, The Root, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Teen Vogue, The Point, and The Conversation. Most recently, Favors was prominently featured in all four episodes of Harvard University professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates’s 2022 PBS documentary series entitled Making Black America: Through the Grapevine which explores how the vibrancy of Black political and cultural movements were highly dependent on spaces that affirmed Black dignity and humanity such as churches and Black colleges.

Favors thrives in the classroom and his role as an instructor has received considerable praise from both his students and his peers. In 2022, North Carolina A&T State University nominated Favors for the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest honor and award for faculty in the University of North Carolina system.In 2014, he was invited to co-teach a course entitled, “Citizenship and Freedom: The Civil Rights Era,” alongside Pulitzer Prize winning historian Taylor Branch at the University of Baltimore. The course featured in-class interviews with civil rights movement icons such as Harry Belafonte, Dianne Nash, Bob Moses, and Bernard Lafayette. At his previous institution, Clayton State University, Favors’s dedication to classroom instruction was recognized with the 2021 Alice J. Smith Award for Outstanding Teaching, the 2020 Mari Ann Banks Award for Equity and Inclusion, and the 2020 Jack and Sherry Hancock University Professorship. Favors believes in experiential learning and always seeks to expand his class beyond the traditional classroom space by frequently taking fieldtrips to historical sites that are relevant and complimentary to his course. Most recently, Favors delivered a lecture this past fall semester on the legacy of student activism and the civil rights movement at the actual epicenter of 1960s direct action protest – the former Woolworth’s Store where the student sit-ins first began which has since been converted to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

Dr. Favors is a major advocate for preserving and investing in the humanities and social sciences and has provided consulting for the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was instrumental in facilitating networking opportunities for the latter who extended their outreach to several HBCUs with Favors’s assistance. In 2022, he was the co-principal investigator on two major grants that totaled over one million dollars in funding for a center to study and promote social justice initiatives and the establishment of a course to study how youth culture and activism have reshaped the contours of American democracy. Moreover, Favors strongly believes that our path towards building a more just, equitable, and compassionate society that will improve the welfare of the human race must be charted by examining and studying the human condition, and his research, service, and commitment to his students reflect those ideals.