[2] Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Graduate Center of the City University of New York Williams studied cultural anthropology at Duke University, earning a B.A.
She encourages her students to read fiction, poetry and self-help books side-by-side with academic scholarship.
[5] In January 2017, she was promoted and received tenure in the Department of Anthropology at the University Colorado, and later that year she was hired as an associate professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
In 2018 she published The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism.
[6] Williams describes her pedagogical approach in "Radical Honesty: Truth-telling as Pedagogy for Working through Shame in Academic Spaces", a chapter in "Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment" (May 2016) encouraging her students to challenge racist institutional traditions by overcoming shame and fostering change.