When Carole Boyce Davies, professor of Africana studies and English, first began studying African and African diaspora literature and culture, the field was dominated by male scholars and writers—both as teachers and subjects of study, according to this story on the Cornell Resarch website. Boyce Davies arrived at just the right moment to make significant contributions.
“After the Black Power and Feminist movements, the paradigms began to shift toward recognizing the contributions of a new crop of young black women,” Boyce Davies says in the story. “We were just coming into the academy as scholars in various fields, and we felt empowered to ask: Where are the women? Where are the women writers?”
Since then, Boyce Davies has spent her career making room for the experiences and voices of African-descended women all over the globe, with an emphasis on voices inside but also outside the United States.
