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Hazel V. Carby | |
|---|---|
| Born | Hazel Vivian Carby 15 January 1948 Okehampton, Devon, UK |
| Spouse | Michael Denning |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Portsmouth Polytechnic, London University, Birmingham University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | English |
| Sub-discipline | African American studies, American studies |
| Institutions | Wesleyan University, Yale University |
Hazel Vivian Carby (born 15 January 1948 in Okehampton, Devon)[1] is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.
Hazel Carby was born to Jamaican and Welsh parents in Okehampton, Devon, UK, on 15 January 1948. She earned a BA degree in English and history from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970, then a PGCE in 1972, at the Institute of Education, London University. She taught high school from 1972 to 1979, then went back to university, at Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, where she gained a M.A (1979) and a Ph.D. (1984).[2]
In 1981, Carby was appointed as a lecturer in the English Department at Yale University (1981–82), after which she taught English at Wesleyan University (1982–89), and rejoined Yale University in 1989. She is now Yale's Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies.[3] Her teaching focuses on race, gender and sexuality in Caribbean and diasporic culture and literature; in transnational and postcolonial literature and theory; in representations of the black female body; and in genres of science fiction.[3]
One of her contributions to African Diaspora studies came with her first book, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987). Reconstructing Womanhood offers studies on black female writers including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Anna Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, among others. Carby followed this book with Race Men: The Body and Soul of Race, Nation, and Manhood (1998), a six-essay collection of critiques on historical sites of black masculinity. Her first chapter, "Souls Of Black Men", is a critique of the gender bias in W. E. B. Du Bois' seminal work The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Carby argues that double consciousness is an erasure of Black female subjectivity. She does not question the importance of this text in black scholarship; she recognizes that because of the crucial status of Du Bois and Souls it is important that she undertakes this critique. After Race Men, she penned Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (1999). Carby has lectured at colleges and universities worldwide including the University of Notre Dame, Stanford University, the University of Paris, and the University of Toronto.
Carby serves on the advisory board of the academic journals Differences, New Formations and Signs.[4][5]
Carby's 2019 book Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso) won the British Academy's 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.[6][7]
Carby married fellow Yale professor Michael Denning on 29 May 1982.
