About
samir meghelli

Dr. Samir Meghelli is an award-winning curator, historian, writer, and educator. He serves as Senior Curator at the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC, the nation’s first federally-funded community museum (est. 1967). He is also a Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at American University’s Metropolitan Policy Center.

Dr. Meghelli received his B.A. (magna cum laude) from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University where he wrote his dissertation under the supervision of Eric Foner. Prior to joining the Smithsonian Institution, he was a professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University and the Paris Institute of Political Science (also known as "Sciences Po," located in Paris, France).

Dr. Meghelli has two decades of experience in the fields of public history and the public humanities. His research, teaching, and curatorial work have spanned a wide range of fields and topics, including U.S. social movements, African American and African diaspora history, urban history, and political history. He has curated and consulted for museum exhibitions; executive produced, directed, researched, and consulted for documentary films; and has led public history projects in Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC. In recent years, he led a research project exploring urban redevelopment politics and community activism across the twentieth century in Washington, DC, and curated the culminating exhibition at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, “A Right to the City” (on view 2018-2020). That exhibition also simultaneously appeared as satellite installations at various branches of the DC Public Library and at a community center at the historic James C. Dent House; he also led the research and curation of an outdoor and indoor exhibition about food justice issues, “Food for the People” (on view 2021-2022), which received the 2020-2021 Smithsonian Award for Excellence in Exhibitions. He was the lead organizer of several national symposiums, including “A Right to the City: The Past and Future of Urban Equity” and “A Museum for the People: Museums and Their Communities, 50 Years Later.”

Dr. Meghelli is the co-editor of The Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness (2006) (with James G. Spady and H. Samy Alim), co-editor of New Perspectives on Marcus Garvey, the U.N.I.A., and the African Diaspora (2011), and his writings have appeared in various books, newspapers, and scholarly journals, including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Tribune, The Washington Informer, Black Arts Quarterly, and The Western Journal of Black Studies, among other places.  He is currently completing a book entitled Hip Hop between New York and Paris: A Transatlantic History (forthcoming from University of California Press).

Dr. Meghelli’s research and curatorial work have received support from the National Park Service, the Social Science Research Council, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Events DC (the official convention and sports authority for Washington, DC), and the Smithsonian Women's Committee. He has been invited to speak at museums and universities around the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Stanford University, University College London, University of California-Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, the American University of Paris, UCLA, Georgetown University, the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, University of Michigan, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the University of Virginia, among others. And he has also presented his research at the Annual Meetings of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Studies Association, American Association of Geographers, and American Alliance of Museums. He is a Board Member of the Marcus Garvey Foundation, a 60-year-old educational organization, and serves on the Community Advisory Board of American University’s Humanities Truck.