About Me
Hi, I’m Apryl.
I study the systems shaping your life—and what it'll take to change them.
MY BIOApryl Williams, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Media, Communication, and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is the author of Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating (Stanford University Press) and co-author of The Injustice of Fairness (The University of California Press).
Her previous research has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Wired, and The Washington Post, among others. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from Google, the Mozilla Foundation, the Notre Dame IBM Technology Ethics Lab, the Center for Critical Race + Digital Studies, and the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
With an interdisciplinary background, her research is influenced by black feminism, technology studies, critical internet studies, critical race theory, and critical media studies. She explores the lived black experience as it is shaped by algorithmic technocultures, the gendered black body, and race and racism as they manifest and evolve in our artificially fragmented society.
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2025—Present: Associate Professor, University of Michigan, Department of Communication & Media, Digital Studies Institute
2020—2025: Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, Department of Communication & Media, Digital Studies Institute
2020—Present: Faculty Associate, Harvard University, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
2021– 2022: Faculty Fellow, University of Notre Dame, Technology Ethics Center
2019– 2020: Faculty Fellow, Harvard University, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
2017– 2020: Assistant Professor, Susquehanna University, Department of Sociology & Anthropology
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Ph.D., Texas A&M University, Department of Sociology, Focus in Race, Gender, and Culture
B.A., Texas A&M University, American Studies, Concentration in Society and Social Policy
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2025 Distinguished Book Award, Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association
2024 Race & Ethnicity Course Development Summer Grant ($2,000)
2024 Michigan Humanities Collaboratory Proposal Development Grant, “Reparative AI,” PI: Germaine Halegoua, Co-PIs: Ellie Abrons, Mathew Bui, Tung-Hui Hu, Apryl Williams ($58,308)
2023 National Center for Institutional Diversity’s Anti-Racism Research & Community Impact Faculty Fellowship, “No More Swipe Wrongs: Teaching About Automated Sexual Racism through Online Dating Tools,” PI: Apryl Williams ($20,000)
2022 Award for Inclusion Research, Google, “Algorithmic Reparation as Participatory Machine Learning,” Co-PIs: Apryl Williams and Jenny Davis ($60,000)
2022 Public Sociology Award, Communication Information Technology and Media Sociology (CITAMS) Section of the American Sociological Association
2021 National Center for Institutional Diversity’s Anti-Racism and Precedents for Change Grant for ”Algorithmic Reparation”, Co-PIs: Apryl Williams and Jenny Davis ($25,000)
2020 Advance Inclusion, Diversity & Access Grant for ”The Effects of Security Privatization on Communities of Color”, Mississippi State University, Co-PIs, Ben Tkach and Apryl Williams, ($9,500)
2019 Natalie Allon Research Award, Sociologists for Women in Society ($2,400)
2016 Ruth Schaffer “Best Graduate Student Paper” Award, Texas A&M University ($1,000)
2015 USAID Global Development Lab & Buffet Foundation Research Grant ($2,500)
“Every algorithm carries the fingerprints of the society that built it—its histories, its hierarchies, its blind spots. I study what that means for Black people, for marginalized communities, for anyone whose life is quietly being shaped by systems that were never designed with them in mind.”
—Apryl Williams
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