Chad Williams, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History
Chad Williams is a native of California and grew up in San Francisco. He attended college at UCLA, where he earned a BA with honors in History and African American Studies. Chad went on to graduate school at Princeton University, studying with Nell Irvin Painter, and receiving both his MA and Ph.D. in History. Since 2004, he has taught at Hamilton College, one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. His courses have spanned U.S., African American and African diaspora history, broadly, and race, war and society, African American intellectual history, and the New Negro, specifically.
Chad is widely recognized as an expert on African Americans and World War I and, more generally, African Americans and the military. His first book, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Widely praised as a landmark study, Torchbearers of Democracy has won the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History. A recipient of the Hamilton College 2011 Dean’s Scholarly Achievement Award, Chad has published articles and book reviews in numerous leading journals and collections. He has earned fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He is currently completing a study of W. E. B. Du Bois’s historical writings on World War I. He is currently completing a study of W. E. B. Du Bois’s historical writings on World War I.
Chad lives in Clinton, NY with his wife, Madeleine, and their two boys, Gabriel and Michael.