Thadious Davis | |
---|---|
Born | 1944 [1] |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Southern University (B.S.); Atlanta University (N.A.); Boston University (PhD,) |
Thesis | Faulkner's "Negro" : art and the Southern context, 1926–1936 (1976) |
Thadious M. Davis is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is best known for her work on African American and Southern literature.
Davis has a B.S. from Southern University and an M.A. from Atlanta University. [1] She earned her Ph.D. from Boston University. [2]
She has been a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brown University, and Vanderbilt University, where she held the position of the Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of English. As of 2022, she is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. [3]
Davis has been a fellow at multiple libraries, including the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where she held the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellowship. [3]
Davis is known for her writings on race, gender, and region. [4] She wrote a biography of Nella Larsen, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, [1] and edited the Penguin Classics editions of both of Larsen's books: Passing and Quicksand .
Davis's 2009 book, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner'sGo Down Moses, received honorable mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize Winners given by from the Modern Language Association. [5] Her 2014 book, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, Literature focuses on writings by black southern writers from Mississippi and Louisiana. [6]
In 1994, Davis received the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Feminist Scholarship from Spelman College. In 1995, the College Language Association presented Davis with an award for creative scholarship for her book on Nella Larsen.
Davis received a lifetime achievement award from the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in 2007. In 2017, she received the Callaloo's Lifetime Achievement Award for American Literary and Cultural Studies. [1]
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time. Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
Helen Johnson was an African-American poet during the Harlem Renaissance. She is remembered today for her poetry that captures both the challenges and the excitement of this era during her short-lived career.
Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects. However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".
Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!, such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and with modernism. His reputation stems from his novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal at a black school in rural Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". He resisted being classified as a "Negro" writer, as he identified as "American". For more than a decade Toomer was an influential follower and representative of the pioneering spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff. Later in life he took up Quakerism.
Anne Bethel Spencer was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. She was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, despite living in Virginia for most of her life, far from the center of the movement in New York. She met Edward Spencer while attending Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Following their marriage in 1901, the couple moved into a house he built at 1313 Pierce Street, where they raised a family and lived for the remainder of their lives.
Passing (1929) is a novel by American author Nella Larsen. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of "racial passing", which is a key element of the novel. Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack) Bellew, is significant and is a catalyst for the tragic events.
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
Eric Derwent Walrond was an Afro-Caribbean Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist. Born in Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, Walrond was well-travelled, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York City, and eventually England. He made a lasting contribution to literature, his most famous book being Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28; it remains in print today as a classic of its era.
George B. Hutchinson is an American scholar, Professor of Literatures in English and Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture at Cornell University, where he is also Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He is well known for his transformative work on 19th- and 20th-century American and African American literature and culture, focusing especially on the racial mores, materialistic addictions, and ecological errors of the United States. A recipient of both the NEH and Guggenheim Fellowships, he is the author of several foundational books.
Karla Francesca Holloway is an American academic. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in the Duke University School of Law as well as the university's Department of English, Department of African & African American Studies, and Program in Women's Studies. Holloway is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective
Grace Nail Johnson was an African-American civil rights activist and patron of the arts associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and wife of the writer and politician James Weldon Johnson. Johnson was the daughter of John Bennett Nail, a wealthy businessman and civil rights activist. She is known for her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Heterodoxy Club, and many other African-American and feminist organizations. Johnson also supported and promoted African-American children's literature.
The Brownies' Book was the first magazine published for African-American children and youth. Its creation was mentioned in the yearly children's issue of The Crisis in October 1919. The first issue was published during the Harlem Renaissance in January 1920, with issues published monthly until December 1921. It is cited as an "important moment in literary history" for establishing black children's literature in the United States.
Ernestine Rose was a librarian at the New York Public Library responsible for the purchase and incorporation of the Arthur A. Schomburg collection.
Quicksand is the first novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1928. Out of print from the 1930s to the 1970s, Quicksand is a work that explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes. Larsen dedicated the novel to her husband.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a 1955 fiction and photography book by American photographer Roy DeCarava and American writer Langston Hughes. DeCarava's photos and Hughes's story, told through the character Sister Mary Bradley, depict and describe Black family life in Harlem, New York City, in the 1950s.
Edwin Epps House is a Creole cottage built in 1852 in part by Solomon Northup on Bayou Boeuf near Holmesville in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. It was built for Edwin Epps, a slaveholder. The house was a "double-sided, wood frame house with one chimney, and a tin roof" of mid-sized farmers. The Edwin Epps Plantation Site, where the house originally stood, is located off of LA 1176 on Carl Hunt Road. It is one of the historic sites of Solomon Northup's enslavement on the Northup Trail.
The Lincoln School for Nurses, also known as Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home School for Nurses, and Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing, was the first nursing school for African-American women in New York City. It existed from 1898 to 1961. It was founded by Lincoln Hospital in Manhattan. The hospital and nursing school, moved to 141st Street, between Concord Avenue and Southern Boulevard in Mott Haven, the South Bronx, after 1899.
Brenda Gayle Plummer is an American academic and historian whose areas of research are the history of Haiti and African-American history. She is the Merze Tate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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