Raised on a dirt road in the small town of Bainbridge, Georgia, Dr. Wells’s intellectual journey began far from the archives and global institutions she now studies.
That grounding continues to shape her commitment to telling stories rooted in community, resilience, and vision.
Through her scholarship and public history work, Dr. Wells shows that Black women have long been architects of global freedom — and that their history reshapes how we understand the modern world.
She’s writing her first book, which analyzes African American women’s theorization of internationalism and their global endeavors from the 1890s through 1960s. Studying the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), she examines how these organizations communicated, cooperated, and competed while pursuing civil and human rights. The book also traces their engagement in other national and international women’s and civil rights organizations, inter-governmental bodies like the United Nations, and American agencies like the U.S. State Department.
Dr. Wells.s scholarship appears in the Journal of African American History and the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, as well as in edited volumes published by Columbia University Press and Routledge.
She is also the founder and editor of Women of Black Wall Street, a digital humanities project launched during the 2021 Tulsa Race Massacre commemoration. The initiative expands the historical canon by centering Black women’s leadership while training students in archival research and digital literacy.
Dr. Wells’s work has been supported by several funding agencies, including the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the International Chapter of the P.E.O. Sisterhood.
She has received several awards and grants for her teaching, research, and service. In 2022, she was awarded the Land Grant Award from the O.S.U. Faculty Council, Patricia A. Bell Award from O.S.U. Institutional Diversity, and the Rising Star Award from the Women’s Faculty Council.
BRANDY THOMAS WELLS 