Victor Anderson (Ph.D., Princeton) is the Oberlin Alumni Professor of Christian Ethics and Director. He 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 America. 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 

Anastasia Curwood (Ph.D., Princeton) is an Assistant Professor. She 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, the Ford Foundation Post Doctoral Fellowship, and the James Weldon Johnson Fellowship (Emory University).  a.curwood@vanderbilt.edu  

Trica Danielle Keaton (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies. Her research interests and courses (including study abroad) focus on questions of race, (anti)blackness, Black (im)migrant relations, love, and identity politics in French, the USA, and parts of Western Europe. She is a former Fellow of Columbia University’s Institute for Scholars in Paris, France, a former visiting scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, a former Chateaubriand Fellow, and is an Associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Among her various publications, she is the author of Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Indiana University Press 2006 - Foreword by Manthia Diawara), a multi-year ethnography that examines racialized exclusion in the impoverished Parisian outer-cities.  She is co-editor with Darlene Clark Hine and Stephen Small of Black Europe and the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press 2009), which contains her chapter entitled, “‘Black (American) Paris’ and the French Outer-Cities: The Race Question and Questioning Solidarity,” and is co-editor with Tracy Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall of Black France-France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Duke University Press forthcoming). Other publications include: “The Politics of Race-blindness: (Anti)blackness and Category Blindness in Contemporary France” (Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 2010), "Euzhan Palcy-Creative Disssent, Artistic Reckoning: An Interview" (Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender, and the Black International, 2012), and "Where is the love?: Transnational "Black Immigrant/Native" Tensions Across the Atlantic" (forthcoming).  She co-organized and directed in 2010 the "France Noire-Black France" Film Festival in Paris, a defining exploration of the Black presence in French Cinema. She is currently working on her next monograph on (anti)blackness in contemporary France with comparisons to the USA and other parts of Western Europe. "Black Paris" Study Abroad: http://www.blackparisaadsvanderbilt.com/   t.keaton@vanderbilt.edu

Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo (Ph.D, Duke University) is an Associate Professor. She 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 Courtesy Appointment in AADS) i.nwankwo@Vanderbilt.Edu

Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr  (Ph.D., Boston College) is Professor of Philosophy and African American and Diaspora Studies. He 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) is an Associate Professor. She 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. t.ruby.patterson@vanderbilt.edu

Jemima Pierre (Ph.D., Texas-Austin) is an Assistant Professor. She teaches on ideologies and practices of race and its relationship to global structures of power in Africa and the African diaspora.  She specializes in both African diaspora theory and critical race theory as well as on U.S. immigration politics.  Her monograph, Race Across the Atlantic: Postcolonial Africa and the Predicament of Blackness (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press).  It is an ethnographic study of the historical and contemporary cultural and political practices of race-making in urban Ghana; it examines how people are shaped by and respond to local and global hierarchies of race and power. She is currently completing her second book manuscript, “Racial Americanization: Conceptualizing Black Immigrants in the U.S.”  Professor Pierre has published in journals such as: American Anthropologist, Identities, Social Text, Feminist Review, Transforming Anthropology, Cultural Dynamics, and Philosophia Africana. She was the 2009-2010 William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.  She has also been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including the National Science Foundation, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, The Smithsonian Institution, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, the Social Science Research Council, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the David C. Driskell Center for African Diaspora Studies. jemima.pierre@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 four novels: The Wind Done Gone (2001), Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (2004), Rebel Yell (Bloomsbury 2009), and Ada's Rules (2012). She is the only black woman in history to write a number one country song. For more on Professor Randall, please visit: www.alicerandall.com; for more on Ada's Army, please visit: www.adasarmy.com; alice.randall@vanderbilt.edu

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Ph.D., Brown) is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of Humanities (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 was Director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/bandy/) from 2006-2012. 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). She currently directs the Research Center arm of AADS. t.sharpley-whiting@vanderbilt.edu 

Gilman W. Whiting (Ph.D., Purdue) is an Associate Professor and Interim Director of Undergraduate Studies. He teaches on the African American diaspora, black masculinity, race, sport, and American culture and qualitative research methods. He is also affiliated with the Peabody College of Education. 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), the achievement gap, and health in the black community. He is currently working on a volume on the Scholar Identity Model as well as a co-authored book on teacher cultural competence. He has articles in The Willamette Journal: Special on African American Studies, Gifted Education Press Quarterly, Roeper Review, 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 

Lewis Baldwin, Professor, Religious Studies
Gregory Barz, Professor, Blair School of Music
Sandra Barnes, Professor, Peabody College of Education (HOD)
Richard J. M. Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History
Dennis Dickerson, James M. Lawson, Jr. Professor, History
Marshall Eakin, Professor, History
Donna Y. Ford, Professor, Special Education, Peabody College of Education
Teresa Goddu, Associate Professor, English and Director of American and Film Studies
Yolette Jones, Senior Lecturer, History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science
Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, History
William Luis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, Spanish & Portuguese
Jonathan Metzl, F. B. Rentschler II Chair of Sociology and Director of Medicine, Health and Society
Beverly Moran, Professor, Law School
Moses Ochonu, Associate 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