College of Arts and Science Vanderbilt University

Program In African American and Diaspora Studies

Faculty

Faculty

Victor Anderson (Ph.D., Princeton) teaches courses in philosophical and theological ethics, American philosophy and religious thought, and African American religious studies. Anderson has published three books, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism, Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersections of an American Philosophy and Religion and Public Theology and Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience. He is currently completing a book entitled, And Then His Son Cried: Religious Construction of Black Gay Experience Experience. A past co-editor of African American Religious Life and Thought Series, Anderson has contributed essays and articles to scholarly journals and edited books. victor.anderson@vanderbilt.edu  

Houston A. Baker (Ph.D., UCLA) is University Distinguished Professor and 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 was released in 2008.
houston.a.baker@vanderbilt.edu (Primary Appointment in Department of English; Secondary Appointment in AADS) http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/site/iGx2W8

Anastasia Curwood (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" (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming) and a political biography of Shirley Chisholm. She is recipient of the Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the Ford Foundation Post Doctoral Fellowship.  (Director of Undergraduate Studies
a.curwood@vanderbilt.edu  http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/curwood.html 

Trica Danielle Keaton (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) teaches courses on international and comparative theories of race, “Black Paris,” the Black presence in Europe, Black (im)migration and identity politics, social theory, and comparative diasporas. She is a Fellow at The Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris, France, an Associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and she has been a visiting scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France and a Chateaubriand Fellow. She is the author of Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (2006), a multi-year ethnography situated in the impoverished Parisian outer-cities that documents shifting national identity and “race” politics in contemporary France. She is co-editor of Black Europe and the African Diaspora (2009) containing her chapter “‘Black (American) Paris’ and the French Outer-Cities: The Race Question and Questioning Solidarity,” and she is co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on the politics of blackness and race in France. Her current project focuses on inter-group tensions, (anti)blackness, and diversity in the African diaspora. trica.d.keaton@vanderbilt.edu

Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo (Ph.D, Duke University) specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. African American and Caribbean literature and culture (including that from the portions of Central and South America that border the Caribbean Sea). For this work, Dr. Nwankwo 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, Spring 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. (Primary Appointment in English; Secondary in AADS) i.nwankwo@Vanderbilt.Edu

Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr. (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 (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. She is the Faculty Head of Stambaugh House. She also currently serves on the American Historical Association's Wesley-Logan Prize Committee.(Director of Graduate Studies)
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/patterson.html
t.ruby.patterson@vanderbilt.edu

Alice Randall (B.A., Harvard University, Writer-in-Residence) teaches creative writing and courses on soul food, gender, race, and region. She is author of three novels: The Wind Done Gone (2001), Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (2004), and Rebel Yell (Bloomsbury 2009). She is the only black woman in history to write a number one country song. (Primary Appointments in Creative Writing and Department of English; Secondary in AADS and Women's and Gender Studies)
alice.randall@vanderbilt.edu

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Ph.D., Brown) (Director) is Distinguished Professor of AADS and French. She teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, 18th & 19th century French narratives, Black France, Black Europe, colonialism and empire, critical theory and race, feminist studies, Jazz Age Paris, film and black popular culture. She is also Director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/bandy/). She is the author/editor or co-editor of eleven books. Her latest, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, received the 2007 Emily Toth Award from the American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association for the Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women's Issues. The book was also recognized by Ebony as an April 2007 top non-fiction work. It has been praised in such venues as Ms. Magazine, the Source, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post. Sharpley-Whiting testified before the 110th Congress in 2007 on "Degrading Images of Women" in the Media and Popular Culture in the wake of the Don Imus controversy. She lectures widely in the United States and abroad, has offered commentary on a range of issues for Fox, MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN2, and CBS News. She was the 2006 winner of the Horace Mann Medal for Distinguished Graduate School Alumni from Brown University.  She has recently edited and translated, Beyond Negritude: Essays from Woman in the City (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2009), a book on Paulette Nardal and the Martinican journal La Femme dans la Cité as well as a collection on Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" address entitled, THE SPEECH: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" for Bloomsbury USA (2009) . She is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd Edition) and series editor of "Blacks in the Diaspora" (Indiana University Press) and co-editor with Robert Bernasconi of "Philosophy and Race" (SUNY Press). t.sharpley-whiting@vanderbilt.edu 

Gilman W. Whiting (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, Midwestern Educational Research Journal He is co-editor, with Thabiti Lewis, of a special issue of the journal Ameriquests: "On Manliness: Black American Masculinities." g.whiting@vanderbilt.edu http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/x9396.xml

 


 


Affiliated Faculty 

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

Dennis Dickerson, Professor, History

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

Teresa Goddu, Associate Professor, English 
Peter J. Hudson, Assistant Professor History
Yolette Jones, Senior Lecturer, History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science

 Jane Landers, Associate Professor, 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
Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, English
Carol Swain, Professor, Political Science

 


Trans-Institutional Advisory Board

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