Delia Cook Gillis is a professor of history and founding Director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Central Missouri, based in Warrensburg, Mo. Dr. Gillis served as the
Fall 2019 Faculty Director of the Missouri Africa Program (MAP) at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. Dr. Gillis earned her PhD in History from the University of Missouri in Columbia.
Her teaching and research include African American history, African American women and the Africana Diaspora. She is the co-author of “When they go low, we go high”: African American Women Torchbearers for Democracy and the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election, University Rochester Press (2018), and Sapphires Gone Wild: The Politics of Black Women’s Respectability in the Age of the Ratchet in Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood, Anthem Press (2019). Her current research, Curating A Diaspora Journey in the Year of Return, was presented at California State University Fresno for the distinguished Martin Luther King, Jr.-Gunnar Myrdal Lecture Series in
February and the 8th Annual Diversity Abroad Conference in New Orleans
