Samuel Ng

Samuel Ng, who joined the Smith faculty in 2017, teaches courses on African American history, Black archives, Black feminism and the politics of grief. His research interests include African American history and culture in the 20th century, social movements, gender, queer theory, performance and affect studies.

He is completing his book manuscript, Assemblies of Sorrow: Performances of Black Vulnerability in the Jim Crow United States, which examines the emergence and development of mourning as a viable basis for Black political organizing and protest in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Research for this book has been funded in part by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. 

Ng received a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University and a bachelor’s degree in this field from Yale University. He has also worked as a teaching fellow in the history department of Phillips Academy Andover. At Smith, he received a teaching award in 2021 from the Student Government Association and, in 2022, the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.

Selected Publications

“Professional Mourning: Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ and the Remaking of Black Consciousness.” The Journal of African American History 108, no. 4 (Fall 2023): 629–655.

“Trans Power!: Sylvia Lee Rivera’s STAR and the Black Panther Party,” Left History 17, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013).
Co-Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies.