Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ph.D. is an accomplished author and professor. An academic child and honors student, she won a scholarship to the University of Kansas City. After three years, she quit to work in a war-time quartz crystal firm, spending her free time reading Gandhi. After the war ended, she met and married a soldier from New York stationed in Missouri. Together they moved to Berkeley, studied at the University of California, and raised three sons. She secured a doctorate in the Intellectual History of the United States and Europe.

The completion of her doctorate coincided with the African American Civil Rights Movement. A Lecturer in History at University of California at Berkeley at that time, most of Dr. Birnbaum’s students were arrested during the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Thereafter, an Assistant Professor of History at San Francisco State, Dr. Birnbaum supported the student strike against racism and was fired as a result. She was thus free to travel. She began traveling to Italy where her ethnic and political sensibilities were kindled by Italian feminists. In 1986, she wrote Liberazione della donn (Feminism in Italy) which won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation 1987.

Dividing her time between Italy and the U. S., Dr. Birnbaum wrote Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy, wherein she explored the significance of a dark woman’s divinity in awakening the consciousness of subaltern groups. She became an Affiliated Scholar of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. She was inducted into the African American Educators Hall of Fame; and in 1999 accepted a teaching post at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco. She is currently a Professor of Philosophy and Religion in the Women’s Spirituality program at the Institute.

Most recently, Dark mother: African Origins and Godmothers won the Enheduanna Award for Excellence in 2002. This book uses genetics, archeology, cultural history, and Dr. Birnbaum’s personal story, to demonstrate the irony and tragedy of dominant classes who considered themselves white and their violent treatment of immigrants as dark others.


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