Alison M. Parker is the Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She has research and teaching interests in U.S. women's and gender history, African American history, and legal history. She majored in art history and history at the University of California, Berkeley and earned a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2017-2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University.

Parker is author of Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (University of North Carolina Press, 2020, second ed. Paperback, March 2025). She is also the author of Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (1997).

Parker is now working on a new book on a social movement organizer, the civil rights activist Mary Hamilton, who served as field secretary and Southern Regional Director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the early 1960s.