1. Imani Perry was born on September 5,1972 and is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African American culture.
24 Facts About Imani Perry
1. 2.
Imani Perry was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her social activist parents when she was five years old.
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Imani Perry's mother, Theresa Perry, is a professor in Africana Studies and Education at Simmons University and former dean at Wheelock College.
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Imani Perry's stepfather, Steve Whitman, was an epidemiologist noted for studying racial disparities in health care.
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Imani Perry attended the public elementary school King Open School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, alongside Ilyon Woo.
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Imani Perry attended high school at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, graduating in 1990.
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Imani Perry received her Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies and Literature from Yale University in 1994.
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Imani Perry completed a Future Law Professor's Fellowship and received her LLM from Georgetown University Law Center.
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Imani Perry received the New Professor of the Year award in her first year and was promoted to full professor at the end of five years, winning the Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence.
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Imani Perry was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an adjunct professor at both the Columbia University Institute for Research in African American Studies and Georgetown University Law Center.
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In 2009, Imani Perry left Rutgers to join the faculty of Princeton University.
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Imani Perry released two books in 2018, one on the history of the black national anthem and another on gender, neoliberalism, and the digital age.
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In 2021, Imani Perry was awarded a Fellowship in Intellectual and Cultural History from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
14.
On November 17,2021, Imani Perry's collected artwork, Welfare Queen, by Amy Sherald, sold for $3.9M in a Phillips New York auction.
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In 2023, Perry joined the faculty of Harvard University, where she is the Henry A Morss, Jr.
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Imani Perry is the Carol K Pforzheimer Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
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Imani Perry is the author of six books and has published numerous articles on law, cultural studies, and African American studies, including a book about Lorraine Hansberry.
18.
Imani Perry wrote the notes and introduction to the Barnes and Noble Classics Collection edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
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Imani Perry's work is largely influenced by the Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools, Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and African American literary criticism.
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Imani Perry's 2022 book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, was a New York Times bestseller, and won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
21.
Imani Perry was arrested for the outstanding warrant and physically searched.
22.
Imani Perry was handcuffed, transported to the police station, and handcuffed to a bench during the booking process.
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Imani Perry subsequently drew parallels between police conduct in this incident and behavior cited in the national debate around racially-motivated mistreatment, actual or alleged, of African Americans by the police.
24.
Imani Perry appeared in municipal court the month after her arrest and paid $428 in traffic fines, the judge having reduced and amended the charges to a lesser offense, "from 22 miles over the speed limit, to nine miles over".