Faculty
Arana,
R. Victoria. Graduate Professor
of English
Bergen, Kristin. Graduate Assistant Professor
of English
DeGout,
Yasmin, Graduate Associate
Professor of English
Forbes,
Curdella. Graduate
Professor of English
Hampton,
Gregory. Graduate Associate
Professor of English
Hawthorne,
Evelyn J. Graduate Professor
of English
Oh, Elisa. Graduate Assistant Professor
of English
Kamwangamalu,
Nkonko. Graduate Professor
of English and Linguistics
Kelly,
Ann Cline. Graduate Professor
of English
Shannon,
Sandra G. Graduate Professor
of English
Taylor,
Douglas, Graduate Assistant
Professor of English
Singer, Marc. Graduate Assistant Professor
of English
Tovares,
Alla V. Graduate Assistant
Professor of English and Linguistics
Traylor,
Eleanor W. Graduate Professor
of English
Tsomondo,
Thorell. Graduate
Professor of English
Williams,
Dana A. Graduate
Professor of English
Arana, R. Victoria. Graduate Professor of English.
R. Victoria Arana (Fellow, Royal Society for the Arts) is Professor of English at Howard University, where she teaches contemporary British literature including ‘black’ British writers, postcolonial theory, and advanced writing courses. At Vassar College, Princeton, and The George Washington University, she studied (respectively) romance languages and literatures, comparative literature (Farsi language, Persian literature, Islamic history and culture), and British literature and literary criticism. She edited the Chinua Achebe issue of Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters (Spring 2002), served as a judge for the 2005 Caine Prize for African Literature (U.K.), and has published scholarly essays on African poets and emerging African novelists; the video recording of her Library of Congress address on the literary legacy of Chinua Achebe (Nov. 2008) may be viewed on the LC’s African Division web site. Her most recent publications include Black Travel Writing (BMa/Temple UP, 2004), Black British Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2004, pbk. 2009), ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today (Cambridge Scholars P, 2007, pbk. 2009), World Poetry from 1900 to the Present (NY: Facts on File, 2008), and W. H. Auden’s Poetry: Mythos, Theory and Practice (Cambria P, 2009). She edited the Dictionary of Literary Biography’s (Vol. 347) Twenty-First-Century ‘Black’ British Writers (Detroit: Gale, 2009), to which she contributed at length.
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Bergen, Kristin. Graduate Assistant Professor of English.
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DeGout, Yasmin Y. Graduate Associate Professor of English.
Dr. Yasmin Y. DeGout specializes in African American and Caribbean literatures. She earned the Ph.D. from Howard University in 1998 with a dissertation entitled “The Fiction of James Baldwin: Revisioning the Autobiographical, Gendered and Christian Selves.” She remains ABD at Yale University and continues work on dissertation project entitled “(Post) Colonialism and Cultural Production in the Danish West Indies/United States Virgin Islands.” She has published on the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the short fiction of James Baldwin and his novel Giovanni’s Room, the poetry of Maya Angelou, and the Black Arts Movement drama of Ed Bullins. She also participated in a roundtable discussion on Whiteness Studies published by MLS, and she has provided encyclopedia articles on topics ranging from The Negritude Movement and Leopold Sedar Senghor to St.-John Perse for a forthcoming companion to 20th-century world poetry by Facts on File. Her academic interests include postcolonial studies, gay and lesbian studies/queer theory, and gender studies, and her presentations have covered a range of topics, including Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, photographic representation of the Danish West Indies, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, African American homoeroticism, as well as identity and aesthetics in Sugar Cane Alley. She serves as a member of the Caribbean Studies Program of the College of Arts and Sciences, and has served the Department of English as faculty advisor to the Sterling Allen Brown English Society and as member of a variety of departmental committees.
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Forbes, Curdella. Graduate Professor of English.
Dr. Forbes taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona, before coming to Howard in 2004. Her research interests include postcolonial theory; Caribbean poetics; Shakespeare and postcolonialism; Caribbean literature and culture with particular focus on issues of gender, performance, and orality; and the (postcolonial) issues of diaspora and globalization. She earned her Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of the West Indies. Her doctoral dissertation is titled “Through the Lens of Gender: A Revisionary Reading of the Novels of Samuel Selvon and George Lamming.”
Dr. Forbes is the author of From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender (2005) three works of fiction: A Permanent Freedom (2008), Flying with Icarus and Other Stories (2003) and Songs of Silence (2002). Her numerous scholarly articles appear in Literature and Psychology: A Journal of Psychoanalytic and Cultural Criticism, Journal of West Indian Literature, Small Axe, Aspekt (a Slovak feminist periodical), Anthurium, Postcolonial Text, andCaribbean Quarterly. Her short stories have appeared in journals and edited collections. She has presented scholarly papers at conferences in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Austria, Canada and here in the USA. She was an editor for the online peer reviewed journal Postcolonial Text, is book review editor for The Journal of West Indian Literature, and a member of the advisory board for Anthurium, an online peer-reviewed journal of original Caribbean works and critical studies of Caribbean literature, film, art, and culture. She serves as peer reviewer for a number of refereed journals, including Social and Economic Studies and Caribbean Quarterly. Dr. Forbes is also a curriculum developer. She has served and continues to serve on panels and examining committees for the Caribbean Examinations Council, the regional examining body in the Caribbean. Dr. Forbes has been involved in planning various symposia and conferences, including the conference on George Lamming (The Sovereignty of the Imagination), which took place at Mona, Jamaica, 5-7 June 2003 and the Walter Rodney 25th Anniversary Conference which took place here at Howard in September 2005.
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Hampton, Gregory. Graduate Associate Professor of English.
Dr. Hampton received a B.A. in Economics and African-American Studies from Oberlin College; an M.A. in African-American Studies from Yale University; and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from Duke University. He has published articles in the English Journal, College Language Association Journal, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Callaloo, Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly, and he is the author of the forthcoming book of literary criticism entitled Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires: Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler (Lexington Press, forthcoming 2009-10). Dr. Hampton specializes in 19th and 20th Century American and African-American Literary with special interests in race and gender studies and frican-American speculative fiction. Dr. Hampton annually presents and participates in national and international literary conferences and is a member of the Modern Language Association and a life member of the College Language Association.
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Hawthorne, Evelyn J. Graduate Professor of English.
An expert in Caribbean and American literatures, Dr. Hawthorne holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in English from Notre Dame College. She has been a fellow at Dartmouth College’s School of Critical Theory. Before coming to Howard University, Dr. Hawthorne taught English and interdisciplinary courses at American University, the State University of New York, Macalester College, and the University of Minnesota. Among her published works are articles on Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Edwige Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Seacole, Roger Mais, and V.S. Naipaul in the scholarly journals World Literature Written in English, MELUS, Black American Literature Forum (now African American Review), Journal of West Indian Literature, Biography, ARIEL, Commonwealth Novel in English and Macomere.. She has reviewed books for Biography, World Literature Today, and Belles Lettres among others. Dr. Hawthorne has produced a book on Roger Mais, The Writer in Transition: Roger Mais and the Decolonization of Culture (1989). She is currently at work on her book “The Usable Past: Caribbean Women Writers’ Fictions of Self, Community and Nation,” a study that interprets the role of history in the fiction of Wynter, Brodber, Cliff, Cezair-Thompson and Kincaid. She has been a recipient of Andrew W. Mellon and National Endowment for the Humanities grants and has been invited to present her research at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She was instrumental, as a leader and organizer, in installing a Minor Sequence for undergraduates in Caribbean Studies at Howard University; and she is an active member of the planning committee chartering an undergraduate Major in International Affairs at this university. She was president of the international Association for Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (2003-2006), which publishes the annual scholarly journal MaComère.
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Oh, Elisa. Graduate Assistant Professor of English.
Elisa Oh received her B.A. from Smith College; her M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia; and her Ph.D. in Early Modern English Language and Literature from Boston University. Her dissertation, “Defining Absence: Reading Female Silence in Early Modern English Literature, 1580-1640,” sought to broaden the definition of literary silences and to theorize them as active modes of gendered signification in early modern drama and prose romance. She teaches Shakespeare, a British Renaissance literature survey, a British Literature survey, British Drama, and introductions to the English major and literary theory. She has reviewed a number of books for Sixteenth Century Studies and Seventeenth-Century News, and a recent, prize-winning article in Explorations in Renaissance Culture compares the resistant intentional silences of Cordelia in King Lear and Mariam in The Tragedy of Mariam. Informed by feminist, new historicist, and cultural materialist critics, her research interests focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century public drama, closet drama, women writers, representations of the racial Other in Jacobean court masques, the Sidney circle, concepts of subjectivity, letter-writing, and social dance practices. In terms of other professional activities, she has participated in two research seminars at the Folger Shakespeare Library and presented a dozen papers at conferences such as the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and the Shakespeare Association of America. Before joining the Howard University faculty, she taught at Montgomery College, James Madison University, and the University of Maryland.
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Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M. Graduate Professor of English and Linguistics
Dr. Kamwangamalu is Professor of English and Linguistics and Director of the Graduate Program in the Department of English at Howard University. He holds an MA and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has also received a Fulbright award and, more recently, a Howard University Distinguished Faculty Research Award. Prior to joining Howard University, Dr Kamwangamalu taught linguistics at the National University of Singapore, the University of Swaziland, and the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, where he was Professor and Director of the Linguistics Program.
He is recognized internationally for his scholarship in the field of sociolinguistics and, more specifically, in the areas of codeswitching, multilingualism, language policy and planning, world Englishes, language and identity, and African linguistics. He is co-editor of Language and Institutions in Africa (2000, Center for Advanced Studies of African Society, Cape Town, South Africa), author of The Language Planning Situation in South Africa (Multilingual Matters, 2001), and of over 60 articles in peer-refereed journals. His scholarly publications have appeared in Chicago Linguistic Society, Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Studies in the Linguistics Sciences, TESOL Quarterly, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, World Englishes, Language Problems and Language Planning, to name a few. He was also guest-editor of special issues of the following international journals on language issues in post-apartheid South Africa: Multilingua 17 (1998), International Journal of the Sociology of Language 144 (2000), World Englishes 21 (2002), and Language Problems and Language Planning 28 (2004).
Dr Kamwangamalu is a member of the TOEFL Board, Editor for the series Current Issues in Language Planning (CILP), member of the editorial board for World Englishes, Language Policy, and Studies in Language Policy in South Africa, past editor-in-chief of Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, member of American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and International Association for World Englishes, and a life member of the African Language Association of Southern Africa (ALASA). He has acted as manuscript reviewer for Cambridge University Press, Multilingual Matters and South Africa’s National Research Foundation, and for a number of international journals.
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Kelly, Ann Cline. Graduate Professor of English.
Ann Kelly specializes primarily in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature and criticism. She is author of two books on Jonathan Swift—Jonathan Swift and the English Language (1988) and Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man (2002), which was named by Choice (the journal of the American Library Association) as one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles of 2002.” In addition, she has published numerous articles on Swift as well as on early Black British writers and representations of the "Africanist Presence" (Toni Morrison's term); these have appeared in Swift Studies, PMLA, ELH, Philologus, SEL, CLA, BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, among others. She has reviewed books for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology and The Scriblerian and has served as manuscript referee for PMLA, SEL, and Eighteenth Century Life. She has participated in symposia in Muster, Germany (1989 & 1995), the international “Swift and Irish Studies” conference at the University of Notre Dame (1991), and the celebration of the Swift Tercentenary in Dublin, Ireland (1995). In 1993 she served as Vice President of the East Central society for Eighteenth Century Studies, and in 1995 she served as President. A series of Howard University Faculty Research Grants, a Folger Fellowship, and the American Council of Learned societies have supported Professor Kelly’s research. In the Department of English, she has served as the Director of Freshman English Program (1988-1991), as chairman of the Curriculum Committee (numerous consecutive terms), and on many other departmental committees. Among her many posts within the University, she has served on the Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure Committee of both the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Kelly earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Shannon, Sandra G. Graduate Professor of English.
Dr. Sandra G. Shannon received her Ph.D. Degree from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is currently Full Professor of Dramatic Literature and Criticism in the Department of English at Howard University and one of the nation's leading scholars on the life and works of playwright August Wilson. As extensions of her areas of scholarly expertise, she currently serves as Editor of Theatre Topics journal and Immediate Past President of the Black Theatre Network. She is also Founder of the interdisciplinary-focused August Wilson Society at Howard University.
Dr. Shannon's prolific publication record includes two book length studies: The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson and August Wilson’s Fences: A Reference Guide; one edited collection: August Wilson and Black Aesthetics and a significant number of additional publications in notable refereed journals, such as College Literature, African American Review, MELUS, Obsidian II,and Callaloo and in collections, such as The Influences of Tennessee Williams, Contemporary African American Playwrights, Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest Gaines, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson, and August Wilson: A Casebook. She is also the Editor of a special issue of Theatre Topics on Teaching African American Theatre and a special issue of the Zora Neale Hurston Forum on playwright August Wilson. She is currently editing the forthcoming collection, Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson, to be published by the Modern Language Association. A frequently sought speaker, she has delivered numerous keynote addresses as well as participated in various public forums on current trends in scholarship on African American theatre.
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Singer, Marc. Graduate Assistant Professor of English.
Dr. Singer, a specialist in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland, College Park. Before coming to Howard, he taught at the University of Maryland, Mary Washington College, and Tennessee State University. His articles on contemporary fiction, narrative theory, and popular culture have appeared in Critique, Twentieth-Century Literature, Post Script, African American Review, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and the International Journal of Comic Art. He is the editor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. His current research interests include works of contemporary literature that challenge structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language and signification. Current projects include an article on American comics artist Chris Ware and a book on Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison.
Dr. Singer has previously served as Editorial Associate for Resources for American Literary Study and Chair of the International Comic Arts Forum. His own research on comics has twice won the M.Thomas Inge Award.
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Tovares, Alla V. Graduate Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics.
Alla Tovares received her Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University. Her dissertation, “Intertextuality in family interaction: Repetition of public texts in private settings,” explored the relationship between the public and the private in family discourse by zeroing in on how family members incorporate instances of public discourse, such as television texts and expert advice on parenting, into their private interactions. Dr. Tovares’s research interests include public/private intertextuality in media and everyday discourse, gender discourse, family discourse, dialogicality in literary discourse and everyday conversations. Her articles have appeared in Text and Talk and the Encyclopedia of Communication and Information. She has contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families, Tannen, Kendall and Gordon (eds.), Oxford University press. She is currently interested in discursive features, specifically internal polemic, of endurance athletes' self-talk.
Dr. Tovares is a member of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and International Pragmatics Association. She has presented scholarly papers at professional meetings in the United States and abroad. Before joining the faculty of Howard University in 2006, Dr. Tovares was a professorial lecturer at Georgetown University and American University where she taught Women, Men, and Language; Language and Social Life; Ethnography of Communication and other classes.
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Traylor, Eleanor W. Graduate Professor of English.
Eleanor W. Traylor, Graduate Professor of English and Chairman of the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University, is an acclaimed scholar and critic in African-American literature and criticism. Dr. Traylor obtained a B.A. from Spelman College; an M.A. from Atlanta University; and a Ph.D. from Catholic University, where she pursued her interests in African-American literature and mythology concentrating this focus in a dissertation on Richard Wright. She later received a Merrill Scholarship to the Stuttgarter Hochschule in West Germany and a research fellowship to study at the Institute of African Studies in Ghana and Nigeria. More recently, Dr. Traylor has traveled to South Africa, Paris, Brazil, Jamaica, Martinique, Jerusalem, Switzerland, Germany, Hawaii, and the Virgin Islands to address scholarly forums. Her work has appeared in the form of chapter essays, biographies, articles, and papers on such challenging African-American writers as Larry Neal, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Richard Wright. Among the texts that she has produced are Broad Sympathy: The Howard University Oral Traditions Reader (1996), The Humanities and Afro-American Literary Tradition (1988), a multimedia piece entitled The Dream Awake: A Spoken Arts Production (1968),College Reading Skills (1966), and biographical and cultural scripts for the Smithsonian Institution's Program in Black American Culture. She is currently working on a book on the pedagogy of African-American literature.
Prior to joining Howard University's graduate English faculty, Dr. Traylor was a lecturer at Georgetown University; adjunct professor of Drama at Howard; visiting humanist at Tougaloo and Hobart and William Smith Colleges; English professor at Montgomery College; visiting professor in the African Studies and Research Center at Cornell University; and department chair for the U.S. Department of Agriculture English program. Not exclusively an academician, Dr. Traylor has maintained national and local ties via her advisory roles to the D.C. Repertory Theater Company; the Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Black Arts Festival; and Educators for the Advancement of African-American Literature in the (Public) Schools, which Dr. Traylor established.
In appreciation for her commitment to the African-American community, Dr. Traylor has received numerous awards including the Hazel Joan Bryant Recognition Award of the Midwest African-American Theater Alliance, the Larry Neal Georgia Douglass Johnson Award in Literature and Community Service of the Marcus Garvey Memorial Foundation, the Alumni Achievement Award in Literary Criticism from The Catholic University of America, an Excellence in Teaching Award of the Amoco Foundation, and The George Kent Award for Literary Criticism of The Gwendolyn Brooks Center of Black Literature and Creative Writing, Chicago State University; inducted in The National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, The Gwendolyn Brooks Center of Black Literature and Writing, Chicago State University, October 21, 1999; awarded The Doctor of Humane Letters, Spelman College, May 19, 2002.
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Tsomondo, Thorell. Graduate Professor of English.
Dr. Tsomondo earned her Ph.D. in 1980 at the State University of New York—Buffalo, with concentrations in Shakespeare, 19th-century British literature, and the novel, and minors in African and African-American studies. At Buffalo, she taught Major American Writers, Major British Writers, and writing courses. She taught English, American, African and African diaspora literature and literary criticism at the University of Zimbabwe for an interval (1983-1989) between faculty appointments in our department, where she teaches Shakespeare, literary theory, and British literature, especially 19th-century British literature, on the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her scholarly essays—on Othello, Jane Austen’s fiction, relationships between James Baldwin’s and Charles Mungoshi’s fiction, Caribbean literature, and Victorian fiction—have been published in refereed journals, including Mosaic, Persuasions, Kunappipi, Critique, World Literature Written in English, English Studies in Africa, and the Victorian Newsletter. She has just completed a book, The Not So “Blank Page”: The Politics of Narrative and the Woman Narrator, Defoe to Dickens (in circulation), and she is currently at work on a study that spans several centuries of writing and is titled “What Is the Black Saying?: Talking B(l)ack in Colonial Script, in Colonial Time.”
Dr. Tsomondo has participated in scholarly conferences on Romantic literature, British Studies, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Zimbabwean Literature, and Comparative Literature and Film. Most recently, she was invited to present “From Caliban’s Island to Dracula’s Imported ‘Soil’: A Study in the Vagaries of (Post) Colonial Traffic” at the Sixth Triennial Congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, held at Rhodes University, S.A. She organized a panel (“Monstrous Economy”) for the 2003 Popular Culture/American Culture Association Conference (Albuquerque, NM). She has directed MA theses and doctoral dissertations on a variety of topics in British literature. She is an active member of the Jane Austen Society of North America and of the North/East 19th-Century Women’s Writers’ Study Group and serves as Howard University’s representative on the Board of Directors of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Internationally recognized as an expert in postcolonial theory and the literature of imperialism, Dr. Tsomondo was invited by Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia, to serve as an international, external examiner for the doctoral dissertation “Captive Bodies: Representation, Narrations of Desire, and Slavery” (with particular reference to slavery in the Cape Colony).
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Williams, Dana A. Graduate Professor of English.
A specialist in contemporary African American Literature, Dr. Williams earned her B.A.in English in 1993 from Grambling State University in Grambling, Louisiana; she earned both the M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. degrees in African American Literature (1998) from Howard University. As a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar award in 1999, she was a visiting research fellow at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she completed research on her dissertation author, Leon Forrest. Before returning to Howard University as a faculty member in 2003, Dr. Williams taught for four years at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. During the 2008-09 academic year, she held a Faculty Fellowship at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
In addition to an annotated bibliography, Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood 1999), which she completed as her Master’s thesis at Howard, Dr. Williams completed the first book-length study on Leon Forrest, “In the Light of Likeness— Transformed”: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (Ohio State UP, 2005). She has also co-edited August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (Palgrave, 2004) with Sandra G. Shannon and edited Conversations with Leon Forrest (UP of Mississippi, 2007), African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking (Cambridge Scholars P, 2007), and Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays (Ohio State UP, 2009). Her current research projects include a book-length study on Toni Morrison’s Random House editorship and an edited conversation between composer T. J. Anderson, sculptor Richard Hunt, and Forrest, tentatively titled “This Metal, These Notes, These Words: Richard Hunt, T. J. Anderson, and Leon Forrest on Modern African American Art.” In addition to being a contributor to a number of essay collections, Dr. Williams has published articles in CLA Journal, African American Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, Studies in American Fiction, and the Modern Language Association’s Profession.
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