About Sherri Williams

Dr. Sherri Williams is a race and representation researcher who teaches about how media images are connected to and uphold oppression and inequality. Williams, who was a journalist for a decade before entering academia, teaches journalism and media studies courses that examine how race, gender, class, sexual identity, ability, age and body size are portrayed in mass media. Williams believes that storytelling can be a tool for liberation.

Williams’ research is at the intersection of social media, social justice, reality television, mass media and how people of color use and are represented by these mediums. Williams is interested in how Black people’s use of social media is changing social justice and television. Williams is working on the forthcoming book, Black Social Television: How Black Twitter Changed Television. She is also interested in and studies how marginalized people, especially Black women, are represented in mass media. A popular course that she created, Identity, Power and Misrepresentation, connects anti-Blackness, colonialism, genocide, Orientialism, heteropatriarchy and capitalism to contemporary stereotypes.

Preparing the next generation of journalists who can cover marginalized communities with dignity and accuracy is a priority for Williams. She sometimes partners with national media outlets, through her course COMM 588 Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting, for journalism projects in which students’ work produced in the course is published by national media outlets. Williams’ students 2020 presidential election project, Vision 2020: Election Stories from the Next Generation, was published by The Nation magazine in 2020. Her course-based journalism project, Racial Reckoning: A Year After a Movement Rocked the Nation, was published by Teen Vogue in 2021. She was also the co-director of the award-winning Black on Campus project which used Black journalism students to document Black college students’ experiences amid rising racism. It was published by The Nation magazine in 2018. Those newsroom and classroom collaborations earned Williams the National Association of Black Journalists Journalism Educator of the Year Award in 2021. She was also named one of NBC BLK’S fierce Black feminists you should know.

Global and national media outlets including BBC, Agence France Presse, The Washington Post, Variety, CNN, Al Jazeera America, USA Today, Smithsonian Magazine and Vice interviewed Williams for her expertise on race, representation, journalism and social media. She sometimes contributes to national media outlets as a contributing writer.

Williams, who is from Benton Harbor and Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a proud graduate of the historically Black university, Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi.