Gloria J. Ashaolu

Gloria J. Ashaolu, Ph.D is a UC President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Education. Her research interests include the history of education and race, Black women’s history, African American history, intellectual history, and Black diaspora/comparative Black studies. Her current book-length project examines the pedagogy, curriculum, praxis, and activism of local Black female teachers during the Jim Crow era of segregation and their contributions to the advancement of the Black Freedom Struggle.

Dr. Ashaolu’s scholarship has appeared in The Journal of African American History and Black Perspectives. She has forthcoming publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of African American Education (co-authored with Pero G. Dagbovie) and the Getty Images’ Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories that Changed the World.

Her research has been supported by the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, and more. She serves on the Leadership Team at the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). Through her commitment to research, teaching, and service, she seeks to produce meaningful scholarship that deepens our understanding of the present through our collective past and contributes to a more just and inclusive society.

She earned her Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University. She received a B.A. in History, a B.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies, and a minor’s certificate from the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley—where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.