Ayesha Hardison is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. Her book Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature(University of Virginia Press 2014) examines representations of black women in the 1940s and 1950s. Winner of the Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association of Ohio and designated a 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, the monograph discusses the work of well-known writers like Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Gwendolyn Brooks as well as neglected figures such as Jackie Ormes, Curtis Lucas, and Era Bell Thompson. Hardison has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and she has published articles in African American Review and Meridians. Currently, her research projects include studying African American literature and culture of the 1930s and exploring depictions of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in contemporary black cultural production. She teaches courses on twentieth-century and contemporary African American novels, black women’s writing, and black feminist theory.
Maryemma Graham is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. In 1983 she founded the Project on the History of Black Writing, which has been at the University of Kansas since 1999. With 10 published books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2002), Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice (1998), and The Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (1988) and more than 100 essays, book chapters, and creative works, she will publish with support from the Hall Center for the Humanities the translingual volume Toni Morrison: Au delà du visible ordinaire/Beyond the Visible and Ordinary with co-editors Andrée-Anne Kekeh (Université Paris 8) and Janis A. Mayes (Syracuse University) in 2014 and The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker in 2015. Her public humanities initiatives and international projects since her arrival at KU include The Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, 2002-2005, the Language Matters teaching initiative for the Toni Morrison Society 2003-2010, the Haiti Research Initiative 2011, and “Don’t Deny My Voice,” whose first summer institute on African American poetry was held in 2013. Graham has been a John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a Ford and Mellon Fellow and has received more than 15 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to African American literature and culture, Graham teaches course in genre studies (the novel and autobiography), Inter American Studies (transnationalism, the Global South) and is an active proponent of the digital humanities.
