Nell Irvin Painter Case

Nell Irvin Painter

A Professional Biography

Nell Irvin Painter, a African American Historical scholar, born to Frank Edward Irvin and Dona Lolita Irving on August 2, 1942, in Houston, Texas. Her father Frank worked as a chemist, while her mother was as a personnel officer, and later as a public school teacher. She had one older sibling Frank Jr. but he died as a youngster. The family moved to Oakland, California when Nell was no more than ten weeks old. It was part of the second wave of the Great Migration, millions of African Americans moved from the Deep South to urban centers nationally.

In Oakland, Nell attended and excelled in the public school system. She went on to college and earns a B.A. degree in Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. As an undergraduate student she studied French medieval history abroad at the University of Bordeaux, in France from, 1962-63. From 1965-66 she studied at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. In 1967, Nell completed an M.A. at the University of California at Los Angeles, and in 1974, she earned another M.A. and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. Painter has received honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, among other institutions.

She took on teaching as her core profession. From 1974 -77 she worked as an assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania. She taught here as an associate professor of American and Afro-American history for two years, then she moved on to North Carolina. For the next eight years Nell taught at UNC- Chapel Hill, as a professor of history. In 1988 she was hired at Princeton University, in New Jersey, as a professor of history. Until her recent retirement from teaching, Nell Irvin Painter was the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. She also held the position of Director of Princeton's Program in African-American Studies from 1997 to 2000.

Across the globe Nell Irvin Painter is widely renowned for her exceptional writing ability. As a scholar, Professor Painter has published numerous books, articles, reviews, and other essays, most often tackling the history African Americans. Her first publication was, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. This piece explores the relocation of southern African Americans to Kansas in the 1880s. The book received rave reviews, being held as an "eloquent and moving book" in the Washington Post Book World. She also wrote The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South. This selection is a compilation of oral memoirs, of a black union organizer who allied himself with the Communist Party. This book also merited superior reviews being praised by Benita Eisler as "Moving, fearful and funny, Hudson and Painter's Narrative is as valuable an American life as has ever been wrested from anonymity." Painter also composed Southern History