Kishauna E. Soljour was one of two winners of the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Council of Graduate Schools. Bestowed annually since 1982, the awards recognize recent doctoral recipients who have already made unusually significant and original contributions to their fields.
Dr. Soljour received the 2019 Award in Humanities and Fine Arts for her dissertation, “Beyond the Banlieue: French Postcolonial Migration & the Politics of a Sub-Saharan Identity.” Her research mined the experiences of Black diasporic populations in Paris over the past 70 years to reimagine the place and power of race in contemporary French history.
Dr. Soljour is currently a senior program manager at Working In Support of Education (W!se). In 2019, she became the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in History from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York. Dr. Soljour also holds two bachelor’s degrees and two master’s degrees from Syracuse University.
I think you mean the “First African immigrant woman” because she’s not a “Native born Black American woman whose lineage that can be traced back to the 1600s here in the USA.