Ph. D., The Ohio State University, 1973
M.A., The Ohio State University, 1972
B.A., Stillman College, 1969

African American literature

African American folklore

J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English (Hire Date: 1979)

Trudier Harris taught at the College of William and Mary for six years before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has lectured and published widely in her specialty areas of African American literature and folklore. In addition to lecturing throughout the United States, she has lectured in Jamaica, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, England, and Northern Ireland.

The Ohio State University (Columbus) presented her with its first annual Award of Distinction for the College of Humanities in 1994. Dr. Harris has published articles and book reviews in such journals as Callaloo, Black American Literature Forum, Studies in American Fiction, and The Southern Humanities Review. Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin 1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison(1991), The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001), and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (2002). She co-edited three volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers and edited three additional volumes. She edited New Essays on Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1996) for Cambridge University Press and co-edited The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998),and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).

During 1996-97, she was a resident fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2000, she was presented with the William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared from Beacon Press in 2003. In 2005, she won the UNC System Board of Governors' Award for Excellence in Teaching. Also in 2005, she received the John Hurt Fisher Award of the South Atlantic Assocation of Departments of English (SAADE) for the outstanding contributions she has made to the field of English scholarship throughout her career.

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