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Marcia Chatelain is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, examined the intricate relationship among African American politicians, civil rights organizations, communities, and the fast-food industry. Franchise won several awards, including the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, a James Beard Award for Writing, and the Lawrence Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. Her first book was South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration.

Chatelain has secured grants and fellowships from the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Prior to teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Chatelain was on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma Honors College and Georgetown University’s History Department. Chatelain holds undergraduate degrees from the Missouri School of Journalism and advanced degrees from Brown University’s Department of American Studies. Her latest book, How Bright the Path Grows: The Women who Made the March on Washington, will be published by Pantheon Press in the fall of 2026. Chatelain makes her home in Washington, DC with her spouse and son.

Selected Work

• : A new narrative history of the March on Washington from the women who were honored at the 1963 demonstration for civil rights.