Trudier Harris [Retired]

Trudier Harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor Emerita, taught courses in African American literature and folklore at undergraduate and graduate levels at UNC from 1979 until her retirement in July of 2009. In her thirty-six years of full-time teaching, she also served on the faculties of The College of William and Mary and Emory University. In addition to lecturing throughout the United States, as well as in Jamaica, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, England, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, she has written and edited more than twenty volumes. 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. In 2002, she was presented with the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for selection as Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar. In 2003, she was appointed Faculty Marshal at UNC and served in that capacity until her retirement. Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared from Beacon Press in 2003. Summer Snow was chosen by the Orange County (NC) Commission on Human Relations to inaugurate its One-Book, One-Community Reading Program for 2003-2004. In 2005, she was awarded 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 Association of Departments of English (SAADE) for the outstanding contributions she has made to the field of English scholarship throughout her career. During the fall semester of 2006, she was Faculty Director of an Honors Study Abroad Seminar in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2008, she was awarded the inaugural George H. Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement by an Institute for the Arts and Humanities Fellow at UNC. Her latest book, entitled The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South, was published by LSU Press in May of 2009. Choice designated it one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles” for 2009 in its “best of the best” listings.

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

Trudier Harris can be reached through directories in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.