‘The Past and Present of the 2024 Presidential Election’

Press release

HAMDEN, Conn. – Johns Hopkins University Professor Leah Wright Rigueur, an expert on race, politics and contemporary history, will discuss “The Past and Present of the 2024 Presidential Election” at Quinnipiac University on Thursday, Oct. 31.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is part of Quinnipiac’s Critical Conversations Speaker Series. Rigueur will speak from 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. in the Center for Communications, Computing and Engineering, Room 101, on the Mount Carmel Campus, 275 Mount Carmel Ave.
Rigueur is an associate research professor at the Agora Institute and in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University.

Her areas of expertise include 20th Century United States political and social history, modern African American history with an emphasis on race and political ideology, American presidential elections, policies and civil rights movements and protests, and civil unrest in the United States.
Rigueur’s award-winning book, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power,” covers more than four decades of American political and social history and examines the ideas and actions of Black officials and politicians, from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential ascent in 1980. Currently, Rigueur is working on two book manuscripts. The first, “Race, Riot, Rebellion, and Backlash in America,” examines moments of racialized rage in America from the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 through the Capitol Riots of 2021. The second book, “Mourning in America: Black Men in a White House,” examines race, political ideology, crime and corruption throughout the 1980s, focusing on one of the most outrageous scandals in modern American political history: the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) scandal of the 1980s. Her research has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
She is also the former Harry S. Truman Associate Professor of American History at Brandeis University and a former associate professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

At both the Harvard Kennedy School and Brandeis University, Rigueur leads the Race and American Politics initiative, a multidisciplinary series of seminars and roundtables addressing the most pressing issues in race and American politics.

In February 2024, Rigueur joined CNN as an on-air contributor and from 2020 to 2023, Rigueur was an ABC News contributor. She also hosted the critically acclaimed and award-winning podcast “Reclaimed: The Story of Mamie Till-Mobley”. In 2023, the National Podcasting Academy named Rigueur the “Best Podcasting Host of the Year” for her work on “Reclaimed”.

Her writing, research and commentary has been featured in media outlets including, MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, Washington Post, C-SPAN, The Atlantic, 538, Daily Beast, Associated Press, New Republic, The Root, Al Jazeera (English), BBC Radio, Vox, Politico, The New Yorker, Slate, Sirius XM Radio, Buzzfeed News, Weekly Standard, Washington Times, Choice, MTV News, HuffPost, Vogue, TV One News, Fortune Magazine, A&E Networks, The History Channel and Showtime.

In 2020, she covered the U.S. Presidential Election across all platforms for ABC News. In 2018, she helped cover the mid-term elections for MSNBC and Al-Jazeera (English) and covered the U.S. Presidential Election for Al-Jazeera (English) in 2016.

She holds a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and a bachelor’s in history from Dartmouth College, where she currently sits on the Board of Visitors for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences.

The objective of QU’s Critical Conversations Speaker Series is to foster an inclusive and intellectually stimulating environment at Quinnipiac, promoting inclusivity of thought, respectful dialogue, empathetic engagement and open-mindedness among students, faculty and staff. The events are designed to empower participants to be better prepared to embrace inclusivity of thought by actively listening to and engaging with concepts and ideas that may challenge their personal values, without dismissing or silencing differing viewpoints.