Noliwe Rooks, author portrait
© Peter Goldberg

Noliwe Rooks

Noliwe Rooks is the chair of and a professor in Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history, and political life in the United States. The author of four books and numerous articles, essays, and op-eds, Rooks has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, among others. She lectures frequently at colleges and universities around the country and is a regular contributor to popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and NPR.
Integrated
A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

Books

Integrated
A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 284 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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