Emeriti Faculty

Associate Professor Emeritus De Leon taught courses on United States social and intellectual history, reform movements with a special interest in comparative reform movements, and historiography.

His research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the Howard University-Sponsored Faculty Research Program, and has resulted in a number of books, among them The American As Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), Everything is Changing: Contemporary U.S. Movements in Historical Perspective (Praeger Publishers, 1988), and Leaders from the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism (Greenwood Press, 1994).

 Contact information: dde@howard.edu

Professor Emeritus Balaram Dey teaching interests included World Geography, Climate, Man & Environment, Geography of Black Diaspora, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, and Natural Conservation. His research interests included the application of remote sensing in climatology, hydrology, snow and Ice, environmental monitoring, and climate change.

Professor Dey received research grants from the NSF, NASA, the Office of Naval Research, and the US Department of Education. He has sixty publications in the field of climatology, snow hydrology, environmental monitoring, agriculture, resource management, and ice dynamics. He taught World Geography; Climate, People & Environment; and Geography of Black Diaspora.

Contact information: bdey@howard.edu

Professor Emerita Edna Greene Medford was the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Chair of the Department of History. She was also the Director of the Department of History’s graduate and undergraduate programs. Specializing in nineteenth-century African-American history, she taught courses in the Jacksonian Era, Civil War and Reconstruction, and African-American History to 1877.

Professor Medford was educated at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, the University of Illinois (Urbana), and the University of Maryland (College Park), where she received her Ph.D. in United States history. She lectures widely to scholarly and community-based groups and has presented to national and international audiences on topics that range from Alexis de Tocqueville’s influence on American politics to community-building among American free blacks in Civil War-era Canada, to African American responses to Abraham Lincoln’s wartime policies. Dr. Medford has served as the Director for History of New York’s African Burial Ground Project and edited the volume Historical Perspectives of the African Burial Ground: New York Blacks and the Diaspora (volume 3 of the series, The New York African Burial Ground: Unearthing the African Presence in Colonial New York) history report.

She is the author of Lincoln and Emancipation (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). She has published numerous articles and book chapters on African Americans, especially during the era of the Civil War. Her publications include the co-authored The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views. She compiled and wrote the introductions to the edited two-volume work The Price of Freedom: Slavery and the Civil War - Volume I, and The Price of Freedom: Slavery and the Civil War - Volume II.

Professor Medford has served as a faculty mentor to the Ronald McNair Scholars since 1998, and she has been the faculty sponsor for the campus chapter of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society for 24 years. She is a former member of the Board of Trustees of National History Day, Inc., a member of the Executive Committee of the Lincoln Forum, and chairperson of the Scholars Advisory Council at President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Armed Services Retirement Home in Washington, DC. She serves on the board of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, the Ulysses S. Grant Association, the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College (Galesburg, Illinois), and the Abraham Lincoln Institute. Dr. Medford is a 2009 special bicentennial recipient of the Order of Lincoln, an award given by the state of Illinois, for her scholarship on the president.

Contact Information: emedford@howard.edu

Professor Emeritus Joseph P. Reidy was the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Associate Dean of the Graduate School from 1998 through 2001.

Professor Reidy has taught United States history, including courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the U. S. South, the U.S. since the Civil War, and race, ethnicity, and gender in the modern U.S. His numerous publications include the book From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992). He co-edited with Ira Berlin and Leslie S Rowland, The Black Military Experience, part of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Cambridge University Press, 2010

His book Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) won the 2020 Columbia University Bancroft Prize, the 2020 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia and was the 2020 finalist of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

As the Editor and Acting Co-Director of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, College Park (1977-1984) he helped produce a series of prize-winning, edited books of documents with introductions and annotations in cooperation with a team of scholars.

Several volumes were produced over a number of years (1982-1998) and highlighted the actions of enslaved people, especially workers and soldiers, men and women, in the fight against slavery during the Civil War and after.

His other essays on the history of workers in the U. S. South have appeared in other collections and in the periodicals Agricultural History, Prologue: the Quarterly Journal of the National Archives and Records Administration, The Southern Review, Virginia Magazine of Biography and History, Slavery and Abolition, Southern Studies and Marxist Perspectives, and as chapters in other books. Professor Reidy also has served on the editorial board of the magazines Civil War History and The Filson Club Historical Quarterly.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, among others, have funded Professor Reidy's work. He won the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government three times, the Abraham Lincoln Prize of Gettysburg College, and the J. Franklin Jameson Outstanding Editorial Achievement Prize of the American Historical Association. His latest project is called "African American Sailors in the Civil War Navy," and it aims to identify the names of the 18,000 or so men of African ancestry who served in that war and to interpret their service.

Contact information: jreidy@howard.edu

Professor Emeritus Daryl Michael Scott is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of History, Geography, and Museum Studies at Morgan State University.

Professor Scott specializes in modern United States History and has taught at Howard from 2003 to 2022. He previously taught at the University of Florida and Columbia University. He received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1994.

His book, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996, won the Organization of American Historian's 1998 James Rawley Prize for the best work in race relations. His essay, “Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education,” was published in the Journal of American History in 2004. He is the editor of three books, including a lost manuscript he discovered by Carter G. Woodson, Carter G. Woodson’s Appeal, which was published in 2008. He was the founding co-editor of Fire!!!: The Multi-Media Journal of Black Studies, the second multimedia journal on the JSTOR platform. In 2005, he established and served as the director of the ASALH Press, which replaced the Associated Publishers as the publishing arm of the organization. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of African American History from 2000-2016. He has served on several book award committees, including for the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Pulitzer Prize Committee. He has contributed to the development of social scholarship. In 2004, he established and served as editor of the Woodson Review, a history magazine for the public, and served as its editor for nine years. During the same period, he served as editor of ASALH’s Black History Kit, which has been a public scholarship project since 1948. He has taken leadership roles in professional and community organizations that promote scholarship. He has served on the nominating committee for the American Historical Association, but most of his service has been with ASALH. Between 2002 and 2015, he devoted himself to rebuilding ASALH’s Annual Meeting, taking it from 239 registrants in 2002 to nearly 1,500 during the ASALH centennial. He served as program chair or co-chair for the following ASALH Annual Meetings: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. As Vice-President for Programs for ASALH (2006-2013), he managed the business affairs of the ASALH publications, including the Journal of African American History. He has served as a director of Black Studies program at the University of Florida and as chair of the Department of History at Howard University. From 2013 to 2015, he served as Centennial President of the Association for the Study of African American History.

Contact information:  darScott@Howard.edu

Website: https://darylmichaelscott.com

Associate Professor Emerita Jeanne Maddox Toungara taught courses on contemporary Africa, the African Diaspora and Women in Africa. Her research focuses on Côte d'Ivoire and Francophone Africa. She is the recipient of several study and research awards (Fulbright Hays, NEH, West African Research Association, etc.) and training grants, including a US Institute for Peace grant for African women in gender studies, conflict management, and peace building, and the UNCF grant for minority sophomore students in International Public Policy.

She has lectured for the State Department Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, served as a Public Member on Foreign Service promotions panels, and is a frequent visiting lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute. More recently, she served on the Democratization, Human Rights and Governance team contracted by the US Agency for International Development to prepare the 2015 five-year assessment report on Côte d'Ivoire.

As a former Assistant Provost for International Programs, she established several partnerships between Howard University and institutions in South Africa, and participated in IIE-sponsored outreach programs to Brazil. As a Fulbright Scholar Ambassador, she promotes faculty engagement abroad. She is a Salzburg Global Seminar alumna, a Mellon Foundation GlobalCitizenship Program fellow, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned BA, MA, and PhD degrees in African Studies and History at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Contact information: jtoungara@howard.edu