Alaina Morgan

African-American History, African Diaspora History, Islam, Muslims in the Americas, Modernist Islamic Thought, Black Intellectual History, Mass Incarceration, Urban History, Black Political Movements

Alaina Morgan is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at USC.  Trained as a historian of the African Diaspora, Professor Morgan’s research focuses on the historic utility of religion, in particular Islam, in racial liberation and anti-colonial movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century Atlantic world.  As part of a body of work of intellectual, political, and religious history, Professor Morgan research teases out the connections between religious identity and racial formation, intellectual discourse and grassroots activism, and local and global politics.  

She is the author of Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC, 2025), which considers the ways that Islam and Blackness were used by Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Anglophone Caribbean to form the basis of transnational anti-colonial and anti-imperial political movements from the end of World War II to the end of the twentieth century.  This book investigates the varying ways that Muslims of African descent thought of colonialism and imperialism – focusing at various times on European colonization; American neo-imperialism in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Caribbean; and on the idea of the urban inner city as a colonized and occupied space.  

She is currently working on a project on the history of ideas about outer space in the black imagination. This project, tentatively entitled To Infinity: An Intellectual History of Space in trhe Black Imagination, examines various manifestations of discourses about space in religion, music, art, television, and literature, and the way these have been used by people of African descent around the world to dream of alternative futures.

At USC, Professor Morgan teaches classes on African-American and African Diaspora History; Islam in the Americas; race and ethnicity in America; mass incarceration, discipline, and racialized punishment; Black intellectual history; and Black international movements.