Brenda Gayle Plummer has been employed at the University of Wisconsin since 1991 and is a tenured full professor. She has a total of 22 years of experience in higher education. Plummer received a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University.She has published four books, twelve essays, and numerous short articles and reviews. Her book, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U. S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (1996) was co-winner of the 1997 Wesley-Logan Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians, and winner of the 1998 Myrna Bernath Prize awarded by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. Plummer has won research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other external sources. She served on the Historical Advisory Committee of the U. S. Department of State, which consults with the State Department on historical declassification issues, from 2001 to 2005. Plummer taught at historically black Fisk University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Minnesota before coming to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Plummer's most recently published book is an edited anthology, Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (2003).