Beverly Guy-Sheftall, an expert in women’s studies with a particular interest in the lives of African American women, will give Vanderbilt University’s Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center‘s annual lecture at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 27, in Wilson Hall, Room 103.
Guy-Sheftall’s talk, “Writing the Life of Coretta Scott King: The Agony and the Ecstasy,” is free and open to the public.
“In the aftermath of Coretta Scott King’s death a year ago, it is imperative that feminist scholars begin the complicated task of re-imagining and making visible to a broader audience the fullness of her professional and political life, and commitments, many of which are at odds with her public image,” Guy-Sheftall said.
“This lecture repositions Coretta Scott King as a progressive activist but also probes the challenges involved for a biographer who wants to capture the complexities of her familial life.”
Guy-Sheftall, is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College. She is also an adjunct professor at Emory University‘s Institute for Women’s Studies where she teaches graduate courses in their doctoral program.
Involved with the national women’s studies movement since its inception, Guy-Sheftall provided leadership for the establishment of the first women’s studies major at a historically black college.
Her publications include the first anthology on black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, which she co-edited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; Gender Talk: The Struggle for Equality in African American Communities, which she co-authored with former Spelman College president and current Bennett College for Women president Johnetta B. Cole; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920; Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, and an anthology she co-edited with Rudolph Byrd titled Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality.
Among her numerous fellowships and awards are a National Kellogg Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for dissertations in Women’s Studies and Spelman’s Presidential Faculty Award for outstanding scholarship.
She is a member of the Board of Trustees at Dillard University in New Orleans and has been involved in a number of advocacy organizations including the National Black Women’s Health Project, the National Council for Research on Women and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.
For more information about the lecture, please contact Stacy Nunnally at stacy.nunnally@vanderbilt.edu.
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