Dr Dawn-Marie Gibson - Senior Lecturer in United States History

I teach a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the Department. I contribute to the first year course History in the Making and I am a personal tutor to a number of first year students. I teach a second year survey course on the United States in the Twentieth-Century. The course covers a broad range of topics covering American politics and society. I also teach a second year course on the Civil Rights Movement and a final year special subject on Malcolm X and African American Islam. My special subject relates closely to my previous and ongoing research projects. I offer a postgraduate module on African American Islam and I also teach on our core MA Skills and Concepts courses. I have supervised doctoral students and MRES students in my areas of specialism.

My research focuses on African American Islam and the history of three Muslim communities in particular: the original Nation of Islam (ONOI), the Imam W.D. Mohammed community and Louis Farrakhan’s resurrected Nation of Islam. My first book, A History of the Nation of Islam: Race, Islam, and the Quest for Freedom was published by Praeger in 2012.  My second book, Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam, (co-authored with Jamillah Karim) was published by New York University Press in 2014.  The book examined how African American, Latina and Native American women have interpreted and navigated the NOI’s gender ideologies and practices in light of their multi-layered identities as women of ethnic minorities in America. My third book, The Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and the Men who Follow Him, was published by Palgrave in 2016 and my last book, New perspectives on the Nation of Islam (co-edited with Hebert Berg) was published by Routledge in 2017.

I am currently working on a biography of Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan.  The book is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic for their Islam of the Global West Series. The book will be the first scholarly biography of Farrakhan and seeks to shed light on his early influences, relationship with the church of his youth, conversion to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, and his efforts to restore and rebuild Muhammad’s community in the 1980s.  The book will shed light on the development of Farrakhan’s religious thought after he reached the height of his career in 1995 with the Million Man March and assesses the work of his ministerial body in propagating the NOI’s theology. The book is based on archival research and oral histories.   

I am a member of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), Historians of Twentieth-Century United States (HOTCUS), and a steering committee member for the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW). I currently co-convene the Gender and History in the Americas seminar at the IHR.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - Dawn-Marie.Gibson@rhul.ac.uk