Frank
Roberts, age 28, is one of the nation’s emergent black public intellectuals. A doctoral candidate at NYU specializing in African American Studies, he has been a lecturer in NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, a distinction awarded annually to fewer than twenty-five scholars across the nation.
Roberts received his B.A. in English and African American Studies from NYU in 2004 where he was a member of the Dean’s Honor Society and received the “Man of the Year Award” from NYU’s Organization of Black Women (OBW). He also holds an M.A. from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., he briefly worked as an assistant to legendary civil rights attorney Johnnie Cochran at The Cochran Law Firm in New York City. He continues to lecture as an invited speaker for various civil rights organizations including, most recently, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In the realm of media journalism, he has contributed dozens of op-ed essays to a variety of progressive sources (from The San Francisco Chronicle to The Village Voice). In 2009, he made headlines as the first writer in the country to break the story about the dress-code policy at Morehouse College. His trenchant commentary on the Morehouse dress-code (originally for The Daily Voice and most memorably on theroot.com) spawned a national debate and led to subsequent dialogues on BBC, CNN, MSNBC as well as hundreds of web-blogs across the country.
He is co-founder (with New York Times best-selling author Keith Boykin) of The National Black Justice Coalition, based in Washington, DC.
For 2009-2010 he is a Visiting Scholar at Emory University. A New York City native, he lives in Manhattan.
Booking and media inquiries should be directed to frankroberts@nyu.edu
National Academic Distinctions|Positions Held:
•Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellow| 2009-2010
•Emory University Manuscript, Archives& Rare Book Library Short-Term Fellow| 2009
•CLAGS Fellow (Dissertation Award Recipient)| 2009
•Corrigan Multi-Year Doctoral Fellowship, NYU| 2005-2009
•UC Berkeley Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow| 2003
•Yale University Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow| 2002
