Carole Boyce-Davies - Department of English, Howard University

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's conversation is with Carole Boyce-Davies, Chair and Professor of African Diaspora Literatures in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2023 to present). She is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Humane Letters in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor Emerita of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University where she taught from 2007-2023. From the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was a popular award-winning professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. In 1997, she was recruited to build the African Diaspora Studies Program at Florida International University where she served three successful terms until 2007 when she joined the Cornell faculty. An African Diaspora and Black Feminist Studies scholar in scholarship and in practice, she is a popular speaker on several related topics. In 2015, she was appointed to the prestigious Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon which she deferred and was Visiting Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Beijing, China 2016.. In 2022, she was a visiting professor at the School of Foreign Languages (FLEX), University of Havana during which time she conducted interviews on women and leadership in Cuba, focusing largely on Havana.