Dr. David Ponton III is an Associate Professor and the Undergraduate Director in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, the Director of the Institute on Black Life, and the Chair of the Racial Justice Initiative. During his brief time as director, IBL secured a grant with the Sociological Initiatives Foundation to develop a project for voting rights restoration for veterans in Florida.Dr. Ponton is a first-generation college graduate from Trenton, New Jersey. He completed A.B. in Religion at Princeton University with certificates in African American Studies and secondary social studies education. After teaching high school history for three years, he went on to complete his M.A. and Ph.D. in History with a certificate in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. Dr. Ponton is a social theorist who works to rethink history as a philosophical discipline that can attend to big questions about the meaning of what it means to be human in a world in which racism diminishes access to rights, resources, and being itself. He has published in venues such as Theory & Event, Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, and History & Theory. Dr. Ponton is the author of Houston and the Permanence: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History.