Allida Black
Managing Director, Allenswood Group, LLC
photo by Kaveh Sardari
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Allida Black, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute of the University of Oxford, Special Advisor and Historian to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the Managing Director of the Allenswood Group, LLC, a collaborative she founded to strengthen democracy through education and civic engagement and to preserve and document women’s political history.
In January 2024, Dr. Black completed a three-year term as a Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the Miller Center for the Study of the Presidency at the University of Virginia. She founded and co-directs the Hillary Rodham Clinton Oral History Project, a policy-driven exploration of Clinton’s service as the nation’s 67th Secretary of State and advises the Secretary on her archives and other history-based initiatives.
Dr. Black is also recognized as a leading expert on Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From 1999-2010, as Research Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University, she conceptualized and directed The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, a documentary collection of archival material gathered from 253 archives in the US and abroad, to preserve, teach and apply Eleanor Roosevelt’s writings and discussions of human rights and democratic politics.
Dr. Black has written and edited ten books as well as a variety of articles on women, politics, and human rights policy and has curated exhibits for presidential libraries, the United Nations, national historic sites, and private museums. Outside the academy, she has led workshops around the world on human rights, conflict resolution, and women and girl’s empowerment for the United Nations, the US State Department, and non-governmental organizations.
She is a trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library; secretary of the Gaea Foundation; incoming president of Heartland Alliance International; and a director of the Campaign School at Yale, the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Survivors of Torture, the Kilimanjaro Centre for Community Ophthalmology, and the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Foundation.
Dr. Black holds a doctorate in recent US political history from The George Washington University and is the winner of multiple awards for her scholarship, teaching, and community service. She lives in Arlington, Virginia with her spouse Judy Beck and their two dogs, Hovey and Scout.
