Adriane D. Lentz-Smith

Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies at Duke University where she teaches courses on modern U. S. and African-American history. The author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard, 2009), Lentz-Smith researches and writes about Black freedom struggles and state power in the long twentieth century. Her work can be found in such journals as Modern American History, Southern Cultures, and American Quarterly. 

Lentz-Smith works to bring scholars into conversation with broad publics. She has served as an historical consultant for documentaries, television shows and podcasts in the U. S. and Europe and has been featured on various radio programs and podcasts as well as in the PBS documentaries, Voice of Freedom, Forgotten Hero, American Diplomat,and The Great War. As a senior fellow in Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, she hosts the community conversations series, “The Ethics of Now,” which brings authors, journalists, policy makers, and scholars to Durham to discuss matters of pressing importance to the North Carolina community and beyond.

Her current project, “The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights,” explores how state violence and white supremacy reconstituted each other in the wake of the civil rights gains of the 1960s by tracing the aftermath of one young man’s deadly encounter with the police in 1980s San Diego.  Lentz-Smith holds a BA in History from Harvard-Radcliffe and a PhD in History from Yale University. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her family.