Lisa G. Materson is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and a specialist in U.S. women's political history. She is the author of For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932(UNC Press, 2009; paperback, 2013), which analyzes African American women’s turn to the party system at the local and national levels to undermine institutionalized segregation and disfranchisement during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Materson is coeditor, with Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, of The Oxford Handbook in American Women's and Gender History(OUP, 2018), and the author articles on Puerto Rican women's independence activism and African American women's internationalism. She is currently completing Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence.
Materson’s work has been supported by Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and board member of Women and Social Movements.