The Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC) at Cornell University conducted a very successful search for three senior faculty positions during the academic year 2006-2007. ASRC Director, Salah M. Hassan, is pleased to announce the appointment of three prominent senior scholars:  Carole Boyce Davies Professor of African and African Diaspora Literature, Judith Byfield, Associate Professor of African History, and Grant Farred, Professor of African American Literature and Cultural Studies. These exciting appointments (with two more expected this academic year) are envisioned as part of a five-year plan and self-study by the faculty of ASRC, which include major revitalization of its undergraduate and graduate curricula as a step toward instituting a doctoral program in Africana studies at Cornell. The plan also include strengthening teaching of African languages, and building of study abroad and exchange programs in Ghana, Ethiopia and South Africa.

Dr. Carole Boyce Davies will join Cornell from the English and African-New World Studies at Florida International University (FIU). Recruited to build the African-New World Studies Program at FIU, she served as its director for three successful three-year appointments, which moved the program to international recognition. Boyce-Davies has degrees from the University of Maryland (BA, 1972); Howard University (M.A., 1974) and (University of Ibadan, Nigeria (Ph.D., 1978).  She 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 (Routledge, 1994) and Left of Karl Marx.  Claudia Jones, Black/Communist/Woman  (Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2007).  In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce-Davies has also published the following critical anthologies: Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Africa World Press, 1986); Out of the Kumbla. Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World Press, 1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled Moving Beyond Boundaries (New York University Press, 1995): 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 (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Decolonizing the Academy.  African Diaspora Studies (Africa World Press,  2003).   She is general editor of The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming, 2007), a two-volume encyclopedia.  Currently, Dr. Boyce Davies is writing a series of personal reflections called Caribbean Spaces. Between the Twilight Zone and the Underground Railroad, dealing with the issue of transnational Caribbean/American black identity, and is preparing an edition of the writings of Claudia Jones entitled Beyond Containment: Claudia Jones, Activism, Clarity and Vision.  Dr. Boyce Davies will be joining Cornell in Fall 2008.
 

Judith Byfield joins Cornell from Dartmouth College, where she served as faculty in the History Department and as Chair of Women and Gender Studies Program, and taught courses in African and Caribbean history.  She obtained her BA in African and African American studies and Education from Dartmouth College in 1980, and her MA 1983, M Phil 1984, and PhD 1993 from Columbia University where she focused on African and Caribbean histories and cultures.  The primary focus of her scholarship has been women's social and economic history in Nigeria. Her first book The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890-1940  (Heinemann:African Social History Series, 2002), examined the indigo dyeing industry in Abeokuta, a Yoruba town in western Nigeria. Byfield has published a number of articles on dress, marriage and divorce, and nationalism. She has received a number of grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Fellowship (2002), a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship (2003), and National Humanities Center Fellowship (2007-2008) for her current project, “The Great Upheaval”: The Egba Women's Tax Revolt: Gender and Nationalist Politics in Nigeria, 1945-1954.  In addition to her teaching and scholarship, Professor Byfield has served in a number of organizations within her field. She has been Co-convener of the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association, Chair of the Association of African Studies Programs, and a member of the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association. Currently, she is on the editorial board of the Journal of African History and the Indiana University Press series Blacks in the Diaspora.  Byfield’s appointment begins this year but she will be spending the 2007-2008 academic year as a fellow in the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina.  She will return to start teaching at Cornell University during the academic year 2008-2009.

Grant Farred comes to Cornell from the Literature Program at Duke University, where he taught courses in African and African and African American literature and cultural studies.  Farred earned his PhD. from Princeton University in 1997, and an MA from Columbia University in 1990 after a BA from University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa in 1988. He also taught at Williams College and Michigan University.  He has served as General Editor of the prestigious journal of critical cultural studies, South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) since 2002. He has published in a range of areas, including postcolonial theory, race, formation of intellectuals, sport's theory, and cultural studies and literary studies.  His books include Midfielder's Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Westview Press, 1999), What's My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA (2006), and his most recent Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, forthcoming 2007). He is completing a fourth book manuscript entitled, Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest (forthcoming in from University of Minnesota Press 2008, dedicated to thinking the limitations of citizenship for raced subjects. Farred also edited a volume entitled Rethinking CLR James (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) a collection of essays on the Caribbean intellectual written by major scholars in the field of history, literary criticism and cultural studies. He also edited a special issue of SAQ (2004) entitled After the Thrill Is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa, a serious appraisal of South African democracy, its failure and its successes, in the Post-Apartheid era.  Farred joined the Africana Center this fall 2007, and is currently teaching two courses cross-listed with English: “Writing the African Diaspora,” and “African-American Cultural Theory.”  

AFRICANA STUDIES & RESEARCH CENTER
310 Triphammer Rd.
Ithaca, NY 14850

Tel: (607) 255 4625
Fax: (607) 255 0784
email: spt1@cornell.edu