*In an effort to transform its literary studies program, Vanderbilt University has hired five leading black literary scholars for its English department, including Drs. Houston A. Baker and Hortense Spillers, reports DiverseEducation.com.
The Nashville, Tenn. school currently offers graduate degrees in English with a concentration in African-American literature, but hopes to include doctorate programs in African-American literature in the future.
“This has been a really extraordinary opportunity for us,” says Dr. Jay Clayton, chair of the department. “We have had the unexpected chance to add five people to our already strong group of African-Americans. We now have senior leadership for this group.
Baker, author of “Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance” and “Black Studies, Rap and the Academy,” is leaving an endowed chair at Duke University; while Spillers, author of “Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture,” is leaving Cornell University.
Joining Baker and Spillers will be Dr. Ifeoma Nwankwo, an expert in African-American and Caribbean literature, and Alice Randall, who is best known for “The Wind Done Gone,” a satire of Gone With the Wind. Randall will be teaching creative writing and an innovative course on race and country music. Dr. Charlotte Pierce-Baker, author of “Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape” (and Houston Baker’s wife), will also leave Duke to join the women’s studies department, which falls under the English department at Vanderbilt.
This is the English department’s second wave of hires, with more to come, according to DiverseEducation.com. The first group, who came from such schools as the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, helped Vanderbilt focus on an interdisciplinary approach to literature studies.