Dr. Williams is the associate professor in race, media and communication at American University in Washington D.C.

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 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.

That work earned her the National Association of Black Journalists Journalism Educator of the Year Award in 2021. Williams won the Associaton for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication best teaching practices award in 2024.