Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar

Professor of Africana Studies and History and Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music

History

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Ph.D., Indiana

Director, Center for the Study of Popular Music

Areas of Specialty

Twentieth-Century United States, Social History, African-American

Current Research Interests

Black Nationalism, U. S. Popular Culture

Biography

Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar was born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, California. He received his BA in History from Morehouse College in Atlanta. He earned his MA and Ph.D. in U.S. History with a minor in African studies from Indiana University in Bloomington. Since 1997 he has taught at the University of Connecticut’s Department of History. From 2003-2009 he served as the Director of the Africana Studies Institute. He served as Associate Dean for the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2009-2012. In June 2012 he was named the University’s Vice Provost for Diversity. In 2014 he became founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music.

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar’s research interests include the 20th century United States with a focus in African American history. More specifically, Dr. Ogbar studies black nationalism and social justice movements. He has developed courses, lectured and published articles on subjects as varied as the New Negro Renaissance, mass incarceration, social movements, hip-hop, and urban history. Dr. Ogbar has held fellowships at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, where he completed work on his book, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. He also held fellowships at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, and the Africana studies program at the University of Miami where he conducted research for his book Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. He won a UConn Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship to continue researching and writing his latest book, America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy.

Along with research and teaching, Dr. Ogbar has enjoyed his role as the advisor to numerous student organizations, as well as working in various community service projects.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy, New York: Basic Books, 2023.

Keywords in African American Studies, co-editor with Erica R. Edwards and Roderick A. Ferguson, New York University Press, 2018.

Harlem Renaissance: Politics, Arts, Letters, editor. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Winner of the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, North East Black Studies Alliance (2008)

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Winner of an “Outstanding Academic Title,” Choice Magazine, (2005) Updated with a new Preface (2019).

The Civil Rights Movement: Problems in American Civilization, editor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.