Dr. Sharon Harley, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, researches and teaches black women's labor history and racial and gender politics. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited and contributed essays in the pioneer anthology, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978). She edited and contributed to two anthologies Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers, 2002) and Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (Rutgers, 2008) resulting from two major Ford Foundation grants. She recently published “African American Women and the Right to Vote” in Women and Suffrage (2018) and "I Don't Pay Those Borders No Mind At All:” Audley E. Moore (“Queen “Mother Moore) – Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist-- Reframing Black Nationalist/Pan-Africanist Engagement” in Women and Migrations (2018).

Other selected publications include:

• “The Politics of Memory and Place: Reflections of an African American Female Scholar,” Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, edited by Deborah Gray White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
•  “The Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Gloria Richardson, the Cambridge Movement, and the Radical Black Activist Tradition,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights - Black Power Movement, edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001).
• “Mary Church Terrell: Genteel Militant” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Leon Litwack and August Meier (1988).

She has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as well as the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, and the National Humanities Center at the Research Triangle, North Carolina. In 2010, she was awarded the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for Outstanding Scholarship. 

Dr. Harley has delivered papers at professional history and women’s conferences in the U.S. as well as scholarly meetings in South Korea, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Ghana, South Africa, Abu Dhabi, and China.

She was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service to write a historical study of the Historical Preservation of the Frederick Douglass Home. 

Harley served as Principal Investigator of a Ford Foundation seminar, "Women of Color and Work Research Seminar" (2002-2006) and was Co-Editor/Contributor, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, co-Editor/Contributor, Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, and Editor/Contributor, Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices.”

She served as chair of the U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service’s Mary McLeod Bethune Commission and former chair of Letitia Woods Brown book/article prize committee. She is an active public historian who has given lectures and served as a consultant with numerous museum projects, the Maryland Humanities Council, the Maryland State Department of Education, and directed an award-winning teaching training institute in multiculturalism for the Prince George County Public School System. In the fall of 2019, she was selected by her students as one of the top-rated faculty in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland.

Currently, she is completing a historical monograph about nexus of gender, labor, and citizenship in post-emancipation U.S. and she is the Principal Investigator of a recently awarded Mellon Foundation grant for an interdisciplinary “African/Black Diaspora Studies: Academic and Public Discourse” seminar.