JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ

Dr. Johanna Fernández is associate professor of 20th Century US History and Social Movements at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is author of the acclaimed book The Young Lords: A Radical History, recipient of the American Book Award; the three top prizes of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), including the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award for best first book in History; and the New York City Book Award.

 

Research for the manuscript propelled Fernández’s 2014 FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) lawsuit against the NYPD, which led to the recovery of the "lost" Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, during the heigh of the Cold War, including those of Malcolm X.

 

Fernandez served as History Advisor for ¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States, the first exhibition of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino. She is also co-curator of the now canceled exhibition Latino Youth Movements, which was scheduled to replace ¡Presente! in 2025. Read about the controversy here.

 

In 2022, Brown University acquired through Fernández the papers of imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, a development covered widely in major newspapers across the country. She’s the writer and executive producer of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and editor of a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy, titled The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor. 

 

Among others, her awards include the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa, which took her to Jordan during the Arab Spring, the Schomburg Center Scholars in Residence Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Grant, and the CAUSE Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy in the History Department.

 

Professor Fernández has curated a number of exhibitions, including, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three NYC museums cited by the New York Times as one of 2015’s Top 10, Best In Art.  

 

Fernández’s is writing a book on the historical roots of US Fascism; her article by that title can be found online.