Two Pioneering Rutgers Researchers Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Deborah Gray White and Camilla Townsend are among 252 new members who make up the class of 2026
Two pioneering researchers who gave voice to people and cultures previously excluded from history were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honor societies that was established during the American Revolution.
Historians Camilla Townsend, who tells the stories of indigenous populations in their own language, and Deborah Gray White, known for her groundbreaking research into enslaved women that led to a new category in the Library of Congress, are among 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research, and science elected this year.
This year’s class, announced as the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, includes authors Barbara Kingsolver and Colson Whitehead and actors Jodie Foster and Rita Moreno.
The Academy was established in 1780 to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young republic. Its earliest members include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Since then, there have been 14,500 members inducted including Charles Darwin (1874), Albert Einstein (1924), Martin Luther King Jr. (1966), former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (2003), musician John Legend (2017) and author Salman Rushdie (2022).
“These two exceptional historians—who have served in a department nationally acclaimed for its excellence—have made distinctive contributions to advancing scholarship on America’s past,’’ Rutgers University President William F. Tate IV said. “We are pleased to have the Academy recognize them in this milestone year.”
Deborah Gray White
Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emerita of History
School of Arts and Sciences-Rutgers University New Brunswick
When Deborah Gray White began her research on the history of enslaved African American women, she was told there was "no audience" for work focused on the Black female experience.
She proved the skeptics wrong by carving out an entirely new field of scholarship. Her 1985 book, Ar'n't I a Woman? (based on her dissertation), broke academic ground and forced the Library of Congress to create a new subject category to encompass her pioneering work.
The first tenured Black professor in the history department, White dedicated her 40-year career here to unearthing the experiences of enslaved women, educating students about the racism and sexism the women endured and advocating for the university to hire more Black academics. Both her scholarship and leadership helped lay the foundation for Rutgers’ robust African American history program, which has held the #1 ranking in U.S. News & World Report for more than a decade.
“I kept thinking we need more people, and they hired more. We found the more faculty we had, the more the students wanted to come to Rutgers,” said White, who turned down offers from Ivy League universities to remain in New Brunswick. “Together at Rutgers we were able to create a community that was unlike any other.”
Two years after her retirement, the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emerita of History was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as part its 2026 class.
This month her inbox has been flooded with congratulatory emails from peers, many of whom point out this recognition is long overdue. Their sentiment is not lost on White. She and her long-time friend, Rutgers-New Brunswick English professor Cheryl Wall —who was acclaimed for her work advancing the conversation about African American literature— made a pact years ago that when one of them made it in, she would nominate the other for the same honor. Wall died in 2020 before they could see it through.
“Yes, I am very pleased. Yes, I’m overjoyed,” White said about being elected to the Academy. “But it’s bittersweet because I can’t share this with my colleague who should have been brought into the academy. She is not here, so I cannot nominate her.”
The daughter of former sharecroppers who migrated from the South to New York City, White fell in love with history in high school – despite learning from a curriculum that largely excluded lessons about Americans who looked like her.
Then a teacher handed White Why the North Won the Civil War by David Herbert Donald and a lightbulb went off for her.
“We learned Lincon freed the slaves. But this was the very first time I read anything that explained why. It talked about the abolitionist movement and how the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free any slaves in the southern states. The more books I gobbled up the more she gave me. That’s really what drew me to African American history.”
Much like that teacher who sparked her curiosity, White is most proud of her work as an educator. Under her advisement, Rutgers’ African American history program accepted multi-student graduate cohorts, creating a culture of support for graduate students while growing the program. When White regularly hears from former students who now have students of their own, she shares one request with them.
“When they thank me, I tell them all the time, ‘All I ask of you is to pay it forward,’” she said. “So, I think that is my greatest legacy – that I sent out so many students who learned from me how to be a caring and understanding and attentive professor.”
Camilla Townsend
Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History
School of Arts and Sciences-Rutgers University New Brunswick
Camilla Townsend’s academic career was already off to a promising start at Colgate University in the 1990s when she took a summer class that would transform her work as a historian.
The course introduced Townsend to the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, the Indigenous civilization in central Mexico conquered by Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s.
Townsend, initially a scholar of colonial economic history, was struck by the rich array of Nahuatl literary sources and emerged from the course with a bold new calling: Telling the story of the Aztecs in their own words rather than through the accounts of their European conquerors.
“I have spent the past 30 years reading the histories that the Aztecs wrote in their own language for their own grandchildren, and trying to make them comprehensible to modern people,” Townsend said. “What I wanted to do is serve as an effective bridge between both worlds.”
In seminal works like Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Townsend drew from the writings of young Aztec men who learned the Roman alphabet from the Spanish friars who accompanied Cortés in his conquest.
Unbeknownst to the friars, who had taught the alphabet with the goal of converting the Indigenous people to Christianity, the Aztec students took their newly acquired knowledge of the phonetic alphabet home and used it to record their elders’ recitations of history and other stories in their own language.
“They are marvelously rich sources—full of subtle political commentary, raunchy humor, and evocative imagery,” Townsend said. “They allow us to catch a glimpse of how these Indigenous people experienced the world, both before Europeans arrived, and at the time of conquest.”
The author of numerous works on Native American history, including On the Turtle's Back: Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren, Townsend is also known as a dedicated classroom teacher at Rutgers. Last fall, after being elected to the British Academy, she declined to take a transatlantic trip for the installation ceremony. The reason? She’d miss a week’s worth of her classes.
She recently co-edited with a Rutgers graduate student the book After the Broken Spears, which explores early Indigenous history in Mexico and includes essays by current and former Rutgers students.
“What I long for is to see a world in which more people truly care about those who loved these shores long before we came along,” Townsend said. “So it is immensely important for me to pass along whatever I have learned to Rutgers students, so that they may carry it forward.”
Townsend said she felt deep joy and gratitude to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
“The Aztecs used to say something that literally translates as ‘people have befriended me," Townsend said. “In our own times, we would express the same concept by saying, ‘I am grateful.’
“Nechicnelique. I am indeed grateful.”