Hisham Aidi awarded a Soros Equality Fellowship

Congratulations to professor Hisham Aidi for being awarded a Soros Equality Fellowship. Professor Aidi is one of a group of 13 remarkable individuals awarded the Soros Equality fellowship in 2020. The program, now in its fourth year, is designed to help incubate innovators and risk-takers striving to create and develop new ways of addressing the systemic causes and symptoms of racial disparity and discrimination.

Hisham Aidi will create a web documentary series and book project to study the rise of Afro-Arab and Amazigh migration and activism in the United States over the last 25 years.

 Aidi is senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave 2008), a comparative study of market reform and labor movements in Latin America; co-editor, with the late Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave 2009); and author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon 2014). As a cultural reporter, his work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, and the New Yorker. 

Aidi is the recipient of the Carnegie Scholar Award (2008), the American Book Award (2015), and Hip Hop Scholar Award (2015). He is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, working on a project titled “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-Arab World.” His most recent documentary short is titled Malcolm X and the Sudanese. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University.