Faculty

Rosanne M. Adderley (Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) specializes in the history of the African Diaspora; The Atlantic Slave Trade; the Caribbean and African-American history, particularly during the era of slavery. Her research concerns culture and community creation by people of African descent with emphasis on the years of New World enslavement, although often with a focus on the long nineteenth century during which systems of slavery ended throughout the Americas. She is author of New Negroes from Africa: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Indiana, 2006). She is presently at work on several projects which address changing perceptions of African people and African labor, mostly in the Caribbean, during the era of emancipation; and a proposed book-length study on black experience during the Middle Passage. rosanne.adderley@vanderbilt.edu

Victor Anderson (Professor, Ph.D., Princeton) teaches courses in philosophical and theological ethics, American philosophy and religious thought, and African American religious studies. Anderson has published two books, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism and Pragmatic Theology. He is currently completing a book entitled, Divine Grotesqueries: Essays in African American Religious Thought. Anderson has contributed essays and articles to scholarly journals and edited books. He is the co-editor of the African American Religious Life and Thought. victor.anderson@vanderbilt.edu  

Houston A. Baker (Distinguished University Professor, Ph.D., UCLA) is past President of the Modern Language Association of American. Baker began his career as a scholar of British Victorian Literature, but shifted to the study of Afro-American Literature and Culture. He has served as Editor of American Literature, the oldest and most prestigious journal in American Literary Studies. He has published or edited more than twenty books. His most recent books include Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T and I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family and the South. His critique of black public intellectuals titled Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era is scheduled for release in 2008. houston.a.baker@vanderbilt.edu (Primary Appointment in Department of English)

Anastasia Curwood (Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Princeton) teaches twentieth-century African-American social, cultural, and intellectual history, including the history of the black family and African-American gender and sexuality. Her research centers on the cultural and social contests over African-Americans' marriages in the early twentieth century. She is currently at work on a book entitled "Stormy Weather: The New Negro Marriage and the Creation of a Modern Race."  (Liaison for Student Research/Internship Opportunities) a.curwood@vanderbilt.edu

Kathryn T. Gines (Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Memphis) teaches African American philosophy, social and political philosophy, continental philosophy, Diaspora Studies, and race and gender theory. Her recent publications include, "Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary Hip Hop," in the collection Hip Hop and Philosophy and “Sartre and Fanon: Fifty Years Later,” in Sartre Studies International. She is editor of a forthcoming volume on Women in Hip-Hop. Gines is also completing a book entitled, “Alexander Crummell and Anna Julia Cooper: Constructions and Constrictions of Race and Womanhood." k.gines@vanderbilt.edu

Karen E. Fields(Professor, Ph.D., Brandeis University, Visiting Scholar/Filmmaker-in-Residence). teaches sociology of religion, classical sociological theory and sociology of development and underdevelopment (with special reference to East and Central Africa). She is currently at work on the documentary film Bordeaux’s Africa, a visual narrative of the three-century-old African presence in the French port city. She has been a consultant on the PBS-aired films Shared History (2005) and Born Again (1989). A sociologist by training, her publications include: Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, with Mamie Garvin Fields (The Free Press, 1983), Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, 1985), and a new translation from French of Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of The Religious Life (The Free Press, 1995). 

Joan Morgan (B.A. Wesleyan University, Visiting Scholar/Journalist-in-Residence). Award-winning journalist, author and a provocative cultural critic, Morgan began her pioneering professional career freelancing for The Village Voice. Her first article, "The Pro-Rape Culture," explored the issues of race and gender in the Central Park Jogger case. The article and the heated response to it quickly established Morgan's reputation as a black feminist writer who was unafraid of tackling the most highly charged topics. Two years later, The Village Voice asked Morgan to cover the rape trial of Mike Tyson. Her insightful coverage earned her an EMMA (Excellence Merit Media Award) from the National Women's Political Caucus.   

Morgan’s passion and commitment to the accurate documentation of hip-hop culture combined with adept cultural criticism placed her at the forefront of music journalism. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when she published the groundbreaking book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. Her book has been used in college coursework across the country.

Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo (Associate Professor, Ph.D., Duke University) specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. African American and Caribbean Literature and culture (including portions of Central and South American that border the Caribbean Sea). She has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the DeWitt-Wallace Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Her book, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) is a comparative study of people of African descent in Cuba, the U.S., and the British West Indies in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. She has published articles on Gayl Jones, Martin Delany, on the mechanics of memory in Panamanian West Indian writing, on the politics of intra-racial translation in Langston Hughes' translations of Nicolas Guillen's poety, and on Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographic engagement with the Caribbean.  Her current projects both build on and depart from this earlier work by using ethnographic methodologies as well as literary critical and cultural studies approaches to explore Inter-American engagements in the realms of cultural memory, identity, and language as they appear in poetry, music lyric, and oral histories. Among these projects are a special journal issue on Afro-Latin Americans of West Indian descent and an edited collection (with Mamadou Diouf) on Afro-Atlantic expressive cultures. i.nwankwo@vanderbilt.edu (Primary Appointment in Department of English; Secondary Appointment in AADS)

Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr. (Professor, Ph.D., Boston College) teaches African and African American philosophy, continental philosophy, history of philosophy, social and political philosophy. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, including "On Cornel West on W.E.B. Du Bois," Cornel West: a Critical Reader, George Yancy, ed. (Blackwell 2001); "'Multiculturalism,' Citizenship, Education, and American Liberal Democracy," Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, Cynthia Willett, ed. (Blackwell 1998); "On W.E.B. Du Bois's 'The Conservation of Races'," Overcoming Racism and Sexism, Linda Bell and David Blumenfeld, ed. (Rowman & Littlefield 1995). He is author of On Race and Philosophy (Routledge 1996).  His latest book, In Search of Critical Social Theory in the Interest of Black Folks, with Rowman & Littlefield was published in 2005. l.outlawjr@vanderbilt.edu 

Tiffany Ruby Patterson (Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Minnesota) teaches African American and Black Atlantic history. She is author of Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Temple, 2005) and is Associate Editor of Black Women in United States History, 16 volumes (Carlton, 1990). She has also written "Diaspora and Beyond: The Promise and Limitations of Black Transnational Studies in the United States" in Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain. Un état des lieux (edited by W. Berthomiere and C. Chivallon), and co-author with Robin D.G. Kelley of  "Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World" in African Studies Review. She is currently at work on A Question of Color, a volume in the Schomburg Black Experience in the Western World Series and a history of color consciousness in the United States and Jamaica. t.ruby.patterson@vanderbilt.edu (Director of Graduate Studies)

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Professor, Ph.D., Brown) (Director) teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, 18th & 19th century French narratives, Francophone Studies, critical theory, Jazz Age Paris, film and black popular culture. She is also Professor of French and Director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies. Her books include Negritude Women (2002), Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (1999), Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998). She has co-edited three volumes, the latest of which includes The Black Feminist Reader (Blackwell, 2000). She has recently completed a book on young black women and hip hop culture, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women (http://www.tracysharpleywhitng.com); she is beginning work on black women expatriates in Paris and on Paulette Nardal and the Martinican journal La Femme dans la Cité. t.sharpley-whiting@vanderbilt.edu 

Read from the Prologue of Pimps Up, Ho's Down: http://www.nyupress.org/webchapters/9780814740149pro.pdf
See the book's Table of Contents: http://www.nyupress.org/webchapters/9780814740149toc.pdf

Gilman W. Whiting (Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Purdue) teaches on the African American diaspora, black masculinity, race, sport, and American culture and qualitative research methods.  He also teaches for the Peabody College of Education in the Department of Human Organizational Development.  His research includes work with young black fathers, low income minorities, welfare reform and fatherhood initiatives, special needs populations (gifted, at-risk learners, young black men and scholarly identities), and health in the black community. He is currently working on a book project entitled "Fathering from the Margins: Young African American Fathers, Fatherhood Initiatives and The Welfare State."  He has articles in The Willamette Journal: Special on African American Studies, Gifted Education Press Quarterly, Journal for Secondary Gifted Education, Gifted Child Today, Midtwestern Educational Research Journal . He is editor of the forthcoming volume, On Manliness: Black American Masculinities. g.whiting@vanderbilt.edu (Director of Undergraduate Studies)

Lewis Baldwin , Professor, Religious Studies
Gregory Barz, Associate Professor, Blair School of Music

Vereen Bell, Professor, English
Richard J. M. Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History
Brandi Brimmer, Assistant Professor, History

Tony Brown, Associate Professor, Sociology

Monica J. Casper, Associate Professor, Sociology & Director of Women's and Gender Studies

Dennis Dickerson, Professor, History

Marshall Eakin, Associate Professor, History
Devin Fergus, Assistant Professor, History
Donna Y. Ford, Professor, Special Education, Peabody College of Education

Teresa Goddu, Associate Professor, English 
Yolette Jones, Senior Lecturer, History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science

 Jane Landers, Associate Professor, History

William Longwell, Senior Lecturer, History 

William Luis, Professor, Spanish & Portuguese

Anthère Nzabatsinda, Associate Professor, French & Italian 
Moses Ochonu, Assistant Professor, History

Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy
Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Professor, Women's and Gender Studies and English
Shawn Salvant, Assistant Professor, English
Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, English
Carol Swain, Professor, Political Science

Frank Dobson, Ph.D., Director Bishop Johnson Black Cultural Center
George C. Hill, Ph.D., Levi Watkins, Jr. Professor of Microbiology and Immunology & Associate Dean for Diversity in Medical Education
Beverly Moran, J.D. and LLM,  Professor of Law, Vanderbilt School of Law 
Gregory Barz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Musicology (Ethnomusicology), Blair School of Music