Each spring semester Lois E. Horton teaches in the UH Department of American Studies. During the fall semester she serves as Professor of History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where she is also on the faculties of Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, and the Honors Program. Dr. Horton received her Ph.D. from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her work on African American communities, race, gender, and social change has been published in the U.S. and Europe, and she has lectured extensively in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Professor Horton has been a visiting scholar at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii and the University of Munich. In the fall of 2003, she was the Fulbright Distinguished John Adams Professor of American History at the University of Amsterdam. She is on the advisory board of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Antislavery at Yale University. She has been historical advisor for exhibits at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, the Chester County Historical Society in Pennsylvania, and the New York Historical Society in New York City.

Dr. Horton is coauthor with James Oliver Horton of Slavery and the Making of America (2004); Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (2001);In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (1997); and Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (1979; 1999). She also is coauthor with James Oliver Horton and Norbert Finzsch of Von Benin nach Baltimore (1999). She is coeditor with James Oliver Horton of A History of the African-American People (1995); and contributing author to City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of the District of Columbia (1983) used in the District of Columbia public schools.