About

Director

Dr. David Ponton III

Office: 
Faculty Office Building
201 USF Willow Drive
Tampa, FL 33620
Email: dponton@usf.edu

M.A. (2014) and Ph.D. (2017) in History, Rice University

A.B. (2009) in Religion, Princeton University

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Dr. David Ponton III is a social theorist and a historian of Afro-America and the twentieth century United States. Through his archival research and anti-disciplinary experiments, he challenges assumptions about the meaning and purpose of history in ways that are richly empirical and theoretically sophisticated. His research on segregation utilizes Afropessimism to destabilize our understanding of change, time, and redemption in the singular moment of black suffering. He is the author of Houston and the Permanence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History (University of Texas Press, 2024).

Dr. Ponton began serving as both the Director of the Institute on Black Life and the Chair of the Racial Justice Initiative in August 2024. He also serves as the Undergraduate Director for SIGS.