Dr. Allyson Hobbs comes from a family of storytellers, perhaps chief among them her Aunt Shirley.
It was Shirley Kitching’s fascinating stories shared during holiday and summer visits to Chicago – particularly one about an ancestor who was sent to the West Coast to live her life as a White woman by “passing” – that influenced Hobbs’ decision to become a historian and author.
Now Hobbs, an associate professor of American history and director of African and African-American Studies at Stanford University, spends a lot of time researching historical people, places and phenomena and bringing those stories to life for the public – the same way Kitching and other relatives did for her.
Hobbs loves researching, writing about and teaching history.
“I think what I find most compelling about it is, students are really eager to understand history because they’re trying to figure out their own place in the world,” says the New Jersey native. “They have questions about why things are the way they are today, what happened in the past to get us to now and are trying to look to history for some answers to their questions.”
Academia is not where Hobbs envisioned herself after graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in social studies. She thought she’d go into business – like her father – and had interned at Goldman Sachs.
“Let’s just say, it certainly wasn’t my forté,” she recalls. “I felt like I wanted to do something a little more creative and a little more in the humanities.”
