Dr. Sharon Wright Austin is the Vice President of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. She is currently a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on African-American women’s political behavior, African-American mayoral elections, rural African-American political activism, and African-American political behavior.

Dr. Austin is the author of five academic books: Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (Garland Publishing 2000); The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi Delta (SUNY Press 2007); The Caribbeanization of Black Politics: Race, Group Consciousness, and Political Participation in America (SUNY Press 2016); Beyond Racial Capitalism: Cooperatives in the African Diaspora (co-edited with Caroline Shenaz Hossein and Kevin Edmonds) (Oxford University Press 2023); and the Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors edited volume (Temple University Press 2023). Her forthcoming book is entitled Inventorying African Diaspora Economics: Community Banks in the United States, Canada, and Trinidad and Tobago (co-edited with Caroline Shenaz Hossein and Talia R. Esnard) (Cambridge University Press Forthcoming). She has also published several book chapters and articles and was the first African American editor of the American Political Science Review.

In 2024, she self-published an award-winning children’s book entitled Allan Learns to Talk which discusses her family’s experiences with nonverbal autism. Currently, she is completing a Christian, disability, fiction book entitled The Autism Mom which discusses her experiences as an autism mom and those of other special needs moms. She is also completing Say It to My Face: Black Women, Social Justice, and the Presidency and a book about the battle for academic freedom.

Raised in Memphis, she is a graduate of Christian Brothers University, holds an MA in political science from the University of Memphis, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She joined the faculty at the University of Florida in 2001. Before that, she served as an Assistant Professor of Pan African Studies at the University of Louisville, an Assistant and Associate Professor of Political Science and Black Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.