School of Humanities and Sciences
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Adam Banks
Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
BioCommitted teacher. Midnight Believer. A Slow Jam in a Hip Hop world. Cerebral and silly, outgoing and a homebody. Vernacular and grounded but academic and idealistic too. Convinced that Donny Hathaway is the most compelling artist of the entire soul and funk era, and that we still don't give Patrice Rushen enough love. I'm a crate digger, and DJ with words and ideas, and I believe that the people, voices and communities we bring with us to Stanford are every bit as important as those with which we engage here at Stanford.
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, I come to Stanford from the University of Kentucky, where I served on the faculty of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies and prior to that, from Syracuse University, as a member of the faculty of the Writing Program. In addition to these appointments I served as the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kansas and, jointly with Andrea Lunsford, as the Rocky Gooch Visiting Professor for the Bread Loaf School of English.
My scholarship lies at the intersections of writing, rhetoric and technology issues; my specialized interests include African American rhetoric, community literacy, digital rhetorics and digital humanities. My most recent book is titled Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, and my current digital/book project is titled Technologizing Funk/Funkin Technology: Critical Digital Literacies and the Trope of the Talking Book. -
Jennifer DeVere Brody
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
BioJennifer DeVere Brody (she/her) holds a B.A. in Victorian Studies from Vassar College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship and service in African and African American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, visual and performance studies have been recognized by numerous awards: a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2023 Virginia Howard Fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation, support from the Mellon and Ford Foundations, the Monette-Horwitz Prize for Independent Research Against Homophobia, the Royal Society for Theatre Research, and the Thurgood Marshall Prize for Academics and Community Service among others. Her scholarly essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Signs, Genders, Callaloo, Screen, Text and Performance Quarterly and other journals as well as in numerous edited volumes. Her books include: Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 1998), Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008) and Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis(forthcoming from Duke University Press). She has served as the President of the Women and Theatre Program, on the board of Women and Performance and has worked with the Ford and Mellon Foundations. She co-produced “The Theme is Blackness” festival of black plays in Durham, NC when she taught in African American Studies at Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on performance, aesthetics, politics as well as black feminist theory, black queer studies and contemporary cultural studies. She co-edited, with Nicholas Boggs, the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018). She held the Weinberg College of Board of Visitors Professorship at Northwestern University and has been a tenured professor at six different universities in her thirty year career. Her expertise in Queer Studies fostered her work as co-editor ,with C. Riley Snorton, of the flagship journal GLQ. She serves on the Editorial Board of Transition and key journals in global 19th Century Studies. At Stanford, she served as Chair of the Theater & Performance Studies Department (2012-2015) and Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (2016-2021) where she won a major grant from the Mellon Foundation and developed the original idea for an Institute on Race Studies.
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Joel Cabrita
Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
BioJoel Cabrita is a historian of modern Southern Africa who focuses on Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and South Africa. She examines the transnational networks of the Southern African region including those which connect Southern Africans to the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Her most recent book (The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, Harvard University Press, 2018) investigates the convergence of evangelical piety, transnational networks and the rise of industrialized societies in both Southern Africa and North America. The People's Zion was awarded the American Society of Church History's Albert C Outler Prize for 2019 https://churchhistory.org/grants-and-awards/ She is also the co-editor of a volume examining the global dimensions of Christian practice, advocating for a shift away from Western Christianity to the lateral connections connecting southern hemisphere religious practitioners (Relocating World Christianity, Brill, 2017).
Cabrita has a long-standing interest in how Southern Africans used and transformed a range of old and new media forms. Her first book (Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, Cambridge University Press, 2014) investigates the print culture of a large South African religious organization, while her edited collection (Religion, Media and Marginality in Africa, Ohio University Press, 2018) focuses on the intersection of media, Islam, Christianity and political expression in modern Africa.
Her current project (under contract with Ohio University Press) is the biography of a pioneering African feminist, Christian Pentecostal pioneer and liberation leader, Regina Gelana Twala (1908 – 1968), who co-founded Swaziland’s first political party in 1960 and introduced the Assemblies of God denomination to the region. Celebrated during her lifetime, Twala’s remarkable story is today largely forgotten, in part a consequence of her untimely death in 1968, one month before Swaziland’s independence. Cabrita’s project considers the radically new perspective a figure such as Twala affords on the contribution of women to Africa’s anti-colonial liberation movements and to evangelical history. The book will probe the politics of memory whereby certain African nationalist and religious icons have been erased from the historical record.
Cabrita did her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before moving to Stanford, she held permanent posts at SOAS (University of London) and the University of Cambridge. Her research has been recognized by two major early-career research prizes, the British Arts and Humanities Early Career Research Fellowship (2015) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2017). -
Anne Harper Charity Hudley
Associate Dean of Educational Affairs, Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education and, Professor, by courtesy, of Linguistics and of African and African American Studies
BioAnne H. Charity Hudley, Ph.D., is Associate Dean of Educational Affairs and the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University and Professor of African-American Studies and Linguistics by courtesy. She is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the Symbolic Systems Program. She also serves as the Jan Barker Alexander Resident Fellow for the Ujamaa House. Her research and publications address the relationship between language variation and educational practices and policies from preschool through graduate school. She has a particular emphasis on creating high-impact practices for underrepresented students in higher education. Charity Hudley is the co-author of four books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research; We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom; Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools; and Talking College: Making Space for Black Linguistic Practices in Higher Education. Her fifth book, Talking Faculty: Professional and Linguistic Choices for Black Faculty Thriving in U.S. Higher Education, will appear in 2026. She is the co-editor of several collections, including Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics.
Her other publications have appeared in Language, The Journal of English Linguistics, Child Development, Language Variation, and Change, American Speech, Language and Linguistics Compass, Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations, and many book collections, including The Handbook of African-American Psychology, Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Literacy Education, Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, and Oxford Handbook of Language in Society. She has been an invited speaker for numerous keynotes and academic meetings, provides lectures and workshops for K-12 teachers, and generously contributes to community initiatives and public intellectual work.
Dean Charity Hudley is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her contributions have been recognized with a Public Engagement Award from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, an award from the Linguistic Society of America, and funding from NIH, NSF, the Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Professor Charity Hudley has served on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America; the Standing Committee on Research of the National Council of Teachers of English; as a consultant to the National Research Council Committee on Language and Education; and to the NSF’s Committee on Broadening Participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Sciences. In addition, she has served as an Associate Editor for Language and on the editorial board of Language and Linguistics Compass and the Linguistic Society of America Committee on Linguistics in Higher Education.
Dean Charity Hudley was previously the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at U.C. Santa Barbara. At UC Santa Barbara, she also served as the Director of Undergraduate Research, Vice-Chair of the Council of Planning and Budget, and a Faculty Fellow for the Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning (CITRAL). -
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
BioShelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, where she is also Director of Stanford's American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of forty-eight books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays and reviews, many of which have focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. Her books have won awards from Choice, Library Journal, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Before coming to Stanford in 2003, she was chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and twice on the front page of the New York Times Arts section. In 2017 she was awarded the John S. Tuckey Lifetime Achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies in recognition of her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies." Her most recent book, Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, came out in 2017. Junot Díaz called it "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States."
She has served as President of the American Studies Association and the Mark Twain Circle of America, was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and was a founding editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She has given keynote talks at conferences in Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kunming, Kyoto, La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S.
In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world." In 2023 the Ameriican Studies Association awarded Fishkin the "Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Contribution to the field of American Studies." Her most recent book is "Jim (Huckleberry Finn's Comrade)" published (2025) in Yale University Press's "Black Lives" biography series. Current projects include a book about Hal Holbrook and Mark Twain.
