NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The African American Studies program at Vanderbilt University is poised
for fast expansion under new director T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, one
of the brightest young scholars and administrators in the field.
“My first question to the provost was, ‘How far are you willing to go
with the program?'” Sharpley-Whiting said. “I was impressed with the
feeling that this was really kind of a limitless endeavor.”
The hiring of Sharpley-Whiting, who held a chair of Africana Studies
for three years at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., is part of
ongoing efforts to stress diversity at Vanderbilt, which was founded
with a $1 million donation from Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1873, in part
to help heal divisions in the United States caused by the Civil War.
The University opens the newly renovated Bishop Joseph Johnson Black
Cultural Center building this fall and is expected to announce soon the
hiring of a new director to run it.
The hiring of Sharpley-Whiting is a cornerstone of Vanderbilt’s
diversity efforts, said Thadious Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt
Professor of English, who helped recruit Sharpley-Whiting to Vanderbilt.
“Not only is Tracy Sharpley-Whiting a superb senior scholar with three
monographs already in print, but she also is an energetic administrator
who is invested in building African American Studies as a discipline,”
Davis said. “Her wide-ranging intellectual interests inform her
scholarship and her teaching: history, philosophy, gender, feminism,
race, culture, music, film. She is alert to the ways in which
contemporary cultural studies can reach students today.”
Sharpley-Whiting, 37, was born and raised in St. Louis. She earned a
bachelor’s degree in French literature from the University of
Rochester, with a minor in African economic history. After earning her
master’s in French literature from Miami University, she went on to
Brown University and earned a doctorate in French Studies, with a minor
in African American Literary and Cultural Criticism.
Sharpley-Whiting began teaching at Purdue University in 1994, where she
was awarded early tenure and then made a full professor just seven
years after earning her doctorate. She moved to Hamilton in 2001, where
she was a professor of French and director of African American Studies.
She is a former runway and print model and plans to incorporate that
experience into her fourth book, Heavy in the Game: Young Women in the
Thrall of Hip-Hop Culture, to be published by New York University
Press.
Sharpley-Whiting says the Downtown Library and Frist Center for the
Visual Arts factored into her decision to move to Nashville. She
intends to be involved with a proposed African American museum in the
city.
“A lot of professors who direct a program don’t want to teach a
lower-level class,” Sharpley-Whiting said. “I absolutely love teaching
intro courses, because that’s where you get people interested. I think
I can convert students. I’m on a crusade.”
Despite those feelings, Sharpley-Whiting will stay out of the classroom
for a year to focus on building up the curriculum. She hopes to launch
several new courses in the spring and to have two new instructors in
place by the fall of 2005.
“You will see the beginning of a kind of blitz,” Sharpley-Whiting said.
“You’ll see African American Studies programming, speakers and series.
There will be lots of activity from the program.”
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu