Biography

Carole Boyce-Davies is Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of the prize-wining Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) on the internalization of Caribbean culture;  and a bi-lingual children’s story Walking/An Avan (2016/2017) in Haitian Kreyol and English.  In addition to over a hundred essays, articles published in major professional journals,  Dr. Boyce-Davies has also published fifteen critical editions on African, African Diaspora and Caribbean literature and culture such as the two-volume collection of critical and creative writing Moving Beyond Boundaries (1995): International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (volume 1), Black Women's Diasporas (volume 2); the 3-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008) and Claudia Jones Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Poetry, Essays (2011) and Pan-African Connections (2019) A member of the scientific committee for UNESCO’s updated General History of Africa, she edited the epistemological forum on “Global Blackness” for the African Diaspora volume and is a member of the Scientific Committee of the African Humanities Forum (based in Mali). Her most recent publication is Black Women’s Rights. Leadership and the Circularities of Power (2022/2023). She is a past president of the Caribbean Studies Association which organized under her leadership the first CSA Conference in Haiti in 2016. Her popular essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian (London), The Washington Post, The Crisis, Ms Magazine, Ithaca Journal, The Black Scholar, Miami Herald, Trinidad Express, Trinidad Guardian, Caribbean Today, Caribbean Contact, Newsweek.