A former Guggenheim Fellow, Lawrence N. Powell is professor of history at Tulane University in New Orleans. He has written and edited eleven books and numerous articles. His most recent books are George Washington Cable’s New Orleans, published by LSU Press in 2008; and Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana, published by UNC Press in May 2000, which won a Lillian Smith Book Prize from the Southern Regional Council for the year 2000 and the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize for 2000 from the Louisiana Historical Association, also for the year 2000. It was also named by Booklist as one of the ten best Holocaust books of the year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of the Holocaust.

Lawrence was vice chair of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism (which he helped found), and a board member of the Amistad Research Center. At present he is the executive committee chairperson of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, and is a board member of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. For five years, until June 2005, he served as executive director of the Tulane-Xavier National Center for the Urban Community (NCUC), which administered the resident initiatives program for the Housing Authority of New Orleans, the city’s national demonstration Welfare-to-Work grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, as well as the city’s JOB1 Youth Career Center. From 2002-2004 NCUC also administered the Individual Development Account Collaborative of Louisiana (IDACL), a statewide partnership of bankers, financial literacy trainers, service providers to assist the working poor buy homes, start businesses, and further their education.

Additionally, Lawrence was the chairperson of the Amistad Center’s 1989 National Civil Rights Conference, “A Continuing American Dilemma” and of the 1996 Plessy Centennial Conference “When the Future Was the Past.” He has been an expert witness in several federal voting rights cases in Louisiana. In 1998 he received the “George Washington Lucas Community Service Award” from the New Orleans branch of the NAACP. In 1999 he was named “Louisiana Humanist of the Year” by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow in the Society of American Historians.