Mia Bay

Mia Bay is an American historian and currently the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies American and African-American intellectual and cultural history and is the author of, among others, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925 and To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells.

Life and career
Bay earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993 and is a professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at Rutgers University where she also served as co-director of the Black Atlantic Seminar at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and is a member of the Organization of American Historians. She was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 2022 for Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance.

Works

 * The Ambidexter Philosopher: Thomas Jefferson in Free Black Thought, 1776-1877 (forthcoming)
 * Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021.
 * Race and Retail: Consumption across the Color Line. Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity, 2015. (Editor, Contributor).
 * Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, with Documents. Co-authored with Deborah Gray White and Waldo Martin, Bedford Books, St. Martin’s, 2012.
 * To Tell the Truth Freely: the Life of Ida B. Wells. Hill & Wang, 2009.
 * The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.