Cornell Celebrates Toni Morrison

Anne Adams, Professor Emerita, specializes in continental African women’s writing and Afro-German cultural studies. Upon retiring from Africana Studies and Research Center, she served as director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture in Accra, Ghana, from 2005 to 2010, while also teaching as Visiting Professor at the University of Ghana, Legon. Professor Adams’ publications on African literature include “Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature” (with Carole Boyce Davies); “The Legacy of Efua Sutherland: Pan-African Cultural Activism” (with Esi Sutherland-Addy); and “Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo: A Reader in African Cultural Studies.” In Afro-German Cultural Studies she has translated “Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out” and “Blues in Black and White.” Professor Adams is currently preparing an anthology of essays by Afro-Germans.

Carole Boyce Davies is a Professor of English and Africana Studies. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of “Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject” and “Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones.” In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Dr. Boyce Davies has also published the following critical anthologies: “Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature”; “Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature”; and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled “Moving Beyond Boundaries: International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing” (Volume 1) and “Black Women’s Diasporas” (Volume 2). She is co-editor with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho of “The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities” and “Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies.” She is the general editor of the three-volume “The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora” and of “Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiography, Essays and Poems.” Dr. Boyce Davies is also the author of the monograph “Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones” and the children’s book “Walking.”

Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English and an affiliate faculty member in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. Dr. Spires’ book, ”The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), traces the parallel development of early Black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship. The book won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the Bibliographical Society-St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize, and it was a finalist for the Library Company of Philadelphia’s First Book Award. Dr. Spires’ current book project, ”Serial Blackness: Periodical Literature and Early African American Literary Histories in the Long Nineteenth Century,” takes up serial publication as both the core of early African American literary history and a heuristic for understanding Blackness in the 19th century.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of “Open Interval,” a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and “Black Swan,” winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as “Poems in Conversation and a Conversation,” a chapbook collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. She is currently at work on “The Coal Tar Colors,” her third poetry collection, and “Purchase,” a collection of essays. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective. Professor Van Clief-Stefanon was one of ten celebrated poets commissioned to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in conjunction with the 2015 exhibit “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works” for MoMA.

Riché Richardson, who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, is an Associate Professor of African American Literature in the Africana Studies & Research Center at Cornell University. Her other areas of interest include American literature, American studies, Black feminism, gender studies, and Southern studies. She was the 2019-2020 Olive B. O’Connor Visiting Distinguished Chair in English at Colgate University. Dr. Richardson received her B.A. in English from Spelman College in 1993 and her Ph.D. in American Literature from the English Department at Duke University in 1998. In 2001, she received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Richardson spent the first ten years of her academic career in the University of California system at UC Davis and received a Davis Humanities Institute Fellowship (2002) as well as an award from the university for Diversity and the Principles of Community (2008). She has produced nearly 40 essays published in journals such as American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, TransAtlantica, Southern Quarterly, Black Camera, NKA, Phillis, Technoculture, and Labrys. Dr. Richardson is a 2017 Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project, whose pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Public Books, and HuffPost. “Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta” was highlighted by Choice Books among the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2008, and her most recent book is “Emancipation’s Daughters: Re-Imagining the National Body and Black Femininity,” published by Duke University Press. Dr. Richardson is editor of the “New Southern Studies” book series at the University of Georgia Press and is also a visual artist.

Roger Gilbert has taught at Cornell since 1987. His teaching and research focus on 20th-century American poetry; he has also published essays on popular culture and aesthetics. Professor Gilbert’s reviews of contemporary poetry appear regularly in the Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. He is the author of “Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry.” Professor Gilbert is currently writing a critical biography of the late poet and Cornell professor A.R. Ammons, about whom he also edited a special issue of EPOCH and co edited a collection of essays.

Shirley Samuels is working on a monograph, currently titled “Democratic Witness,” on witnessing, testimony, and culture in the United States. She teaches at Cornell in several departments, including American Studies; English; History of Art and Visual Studies; and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Samuels’ books include “Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.”; “The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln”; “Reading the American Novel 1780-1865,” “Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War;” “A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865”; “Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation”; and “The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th Century America.” In addition to Cornell, Professor Samuels has taught at Princeton University, Brandeis University, and the University of Delaware. She has held fellowships from The American Council of Learned Societies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Huntington Library.