Linda M. Perkins is University Professor and Director of Applied Gender Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She holds an interdisciplinary university appointment in the departments of Applied Gender Studies and Educational Studies. Her primary areas of research are on the history of African-American women’s higher education, the education of African Americans in elite institutions, and the history of talent identification programs for African-American students.
With a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Perkins has made her career as a historian of higher education with a focus on women’s and African-American. She has served as vice president of Division F (History and Historiography) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), where she served as a member of the Executive Council of AERA. She is the current President of the History of Education Society.
Perkins has served on the editorial board of the History of Education of African American Education. She has published extensively and lectured throughout her career on issues race, gender and higher education.
In her twenty years as director of Applied Women’s (and later Gender Studies), she has served on the boards of the National Council for the Research on Women (NCRW) and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) where she chaired their African board which is housed in Uganda and Kenya and served on the Asia board of the ICRW as well. She has been a member of the Ms. Magazine Board of Scholars for more than a decade.
In her more than twenty – plus years at CGU, Perkins has amassed numerous awards from The Claremont Colleges and CGU. She received the Claremont Colleges Presidents’ award ($70,000) in 2004. She was awarded the Faculty Mentoring Award of the Claremont College (2016). At CGU – she has received two Transdiscipliary Awards (2006 and 2008), a Blais Award (2011-2012), and a Fletcher – Jones Award (2022-2023). Perkins’ scholarship has been supported by several external sources: two Spencer Foundation awards, a Ruth Landes Foundation Award, and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Study Center, a residential international center for scholars and artists in the Humanities housed in Bogliasco, Italy (2022). She was awarded the Anna Julia Cooper Award in Education by the National Veteran Feminist of America in 2013.
Perkins’ recent book, To Advance the Race, Black Women’s Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s (University of Illinois Press, 2024), has been named one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2024 by the Choice Award, and was recently nominated for the Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award for best book published in 2024.
Other publications include Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, 1865–1902 (Garland, 1987) and “The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960″ in the Harvard Educational Review (1997).
Perkins has a forthcoming book chapter on the female African-American college experience, “Black Women and White Philanthropy: the Impact of White Funding In the Development of the First Generation of Black Women Scholars and Artists,” in Ronald Chennault and Derrick Aldridge, eds. Liberation and Education: Perspectives on Black Educational Thought (forthcoming in Rutgers University Press, 2025).
“Fanny Jackson Coppin: Feminist Educational Philosopher of the Nineteenth Century.” In Lydia Moland and Alison Stone, eds. Oxford Handbook of American and British Nineteenth Century Philosophers (Oxford University Press, 2023).
“African American Women, Femininity and Their History in Physical Education and Sports in American Higher Education: from World War I through the Mid-century.” In Femininity and the History of Women’s Education: Shifting the Frame, 37-62. Edited by Jim Allender and Stephanie Spencer
Black Women’s Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s, University of Illinois Press, 2024.
“Femininity and the History of Women’s Education” in African American Women, Femininity and Their History in Physical Education and Sports in American Higher Education: From World War I Through the Mid-century, 2020.
“Black Undergraduate Women’s Experiences of Race, Gender, and Class at Fisk and Howard Universities and Tuskegee Institute Through World War II.” In Black Women in College, edited by Lori Patton, 17-30. London: Routledge Press, 2017.
“The Black Female Professoriate at Howard University, 1926–1977.” In Women’s Higher Education in the United States: New Historical Perspectives, edited by Margaret Nash. London: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2017.
“Bound to Them by a Common Sorrow”: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement.” Journal of African American History: Special Issue: “African American Education, Civil Rights, and Black Power” 100, no. 4 (2015): 721–47.
“Is She a Feminist and Do I Like Her?: Dilemmas of a Feminist Biographer.” Vitae Scholasticae: The Journal of Educational Biography 31, no. 2 (2014): 64–77.
“Merze Tate and the Quest for Gender Equity at Howard University, 1942–1977.” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2014): 516–51.
“The First Black Talent Identification Program: The National Scholarship and Service Fund for Negro Students, 1947–1968.” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education 29 (2012): 173–97.
History of Women’s Activism through Higher Education
Gender & Education
Historical & Philosophical Foundations of American Higher Education
Higher Education & Democracy