Education

• University of Virginia, Ph.D.
• University of Virginia, M.A.
• Bates College, B.A., cum laude, honors in English

Teaching

• Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Professor of English and African-American Studies, Princeton University, 2001–2015
• Visiting Professor of English and African-American Studies, Princeton University, 2000–01 
• Beckman Visiting Professor, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, Fall 1997
• Professor of English, UCLA, 1994–01
• Associate Professor of English, UCLA, 1989–94 (with tenure)
• Associate Professor of English and Afro-American Studies, Princeton University, 1986–89 (with tenure)
• Visiting Faculty in English and Women’s Studies, Columbia University, Spring 1989
• Assistant Professor of English and Afro-American Studies, Princeton University, 1982–86

Administrative Experience

• President, Swarthmore College, 2015–present
• Dean of the College, Princeton University, 2011–2015
• Director, Center for African American Studies, Princeton University, 2006–2009
• Director, Program in African American Studies, Princeton University, 2002–2006
• Chair, Interdepartmental Program in African-American Studies, UCLA, 1997–2000
• Co-Director, Cultural Studies in the African Diaspora Project, UCLA, 1996–2000
• Vice-Chair for Graduate Studies, Department of English, UCLA, 1994–97

Honors

• Walker-Ames Visiting Scholar, University of Washington, May 2011
• Recipient, Bogliasco Fellowship, Liguria Study Center, Italy, 2010
• President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2009
• Keynote Speaker, Japan Association of Black Studies, 2008
• Recipient, Alphonse G. Fletcher, Senior Fellowship, 2006–07
• Visitor, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, 2005–06
• Recipient, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2005–06
• Oscar Micheaux Lecturer, University of Chicago, February 2005
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecturer, Centenary College, January 2005
• Barbara Aronstein Black Lecturer, Columbia University Law School, October 2004
• Academic Speaker/Specialist in Italy, U.S. State Department, May 2003
• Plenary Speaker, Organization of American Historians, April 3, 2003
• Larry Neal Lecturer, Lincoln University, 2003
• Leader, West Virginia University Summer Seminar in Literary and Cultural Studies, 2002
• Distinguished Guest Lecturer, Humanities Institute, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 2002
• Zora Neale Hurston Lecturer, Columbia University, 2001
• Beaver Brook Lecturer, Connecticut College, 2001
• Keynote Speaker, Australia-New Zealand American Studies Association, 2000
• Plenary Speaker, International Conference on Narrative, 1998
• Member, Board of Governors, University of California Humanities Research Institute, 1994–97
• Convener, Minority Discourse Project, University of California Humanities Research Institute, 1992–93
• Member, Supervising Committee, The English Institute, 1991–94
• Recipient, NEH Fellowship for University Teachers, 1990-91
• Recipient, University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, 1990–91
• Donald A. Stauffer Bicentennial Preceptor, Princeton University, 1986–89
• Visiting Research Associate, Center for African-American Studies, UCLA, 1986–87
• Carnegie Non-tenured Faculty Fellow, Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, 1984–86
• Recipient, ACLS Fellowship for Recent Recipients of the Ph.D., 1984–85 (not activated)
• Research Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, 1979–80
• Graduate Fellowship, National Fellowships Fund, Ford Foundation, 1976–79
• Phi Beta Kappa, 1975

Books

• In Retrospect: Memory and the Civil Rights Movement (manuscript in progress)

• Toni Morrison: Writing The Moral Imagination (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell’s, 2012)
• Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998)
• Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987)

Edited Volumes

• Race and Real Estate, co-edited volume with Adrienne Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)
• The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, (Third Edition), co-general editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Norton, 2014)
• “Gender and Cultural Memory,” special issue of Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, Volume 28, No. 1, Autumn 2002, co-edited with Marianne Hirsch
• African American Writers (New York: Scribner's, 1991); revised and expanded second edition, 2000
• Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997)
• New Essays on Song of Solomon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
• “Black Film,” special issue of Black American Literature Forum, co-edited with Camille Billops and Ada Griffin, Summer 1991
• Associate Editor, The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)

Articles and Essays

• “Black Life in The Balance: 12 Years a Slave,” American Literary History, Volume 26, No. 2, Summer 2014, pages 362–366
• “Black Women’s Memories and The Help,” Southern Cultures Volume 20, No. 1, Spring 2014, pages 26–37
• “Toni Morrison,” The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, edited by Timothy Parrish (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pages 270–279
• “The Flesh and the Word: Toni Morrison's BELOVED” A Companion to the American Novel, edited by Alfred Bendixen (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 2012), pages 570–581
• “Song for Winnie,” PMLA, Volume 126, No. 1, January 2011, pages 23–24
• “Remembering ‘Birmingham Sunday:’ Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls,” American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, edited by Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), pages 179–193
• “Born into Slavery: Echoes and Legacies,” Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Maurice Lee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pages 173–182
• “From ‘Race’ to ‘Race Transcendence’: ‘Race,’ Writing and Difference Twenty Years Later,” PMLA, Volume 123, No. 5, October 2008, pages 1528–1533.
• Emmett Till’s Ring,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 36, No. 1 and 2, Spring/Summer 2008, pages 151–161
• “Princeton Presbyterians and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” Journal of Presbyterian History Volume 85, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2007, pages 126–136
• “The Neo-Slave Narrative,” Cambridge Companion to the Slave Narrative, edited by Audrey Fisch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pages 168–185
• “Abundant Evidence: Black Feminist Art of the 1970s,” WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, edited by Cornelia H. Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), pages 400–413; reprinted in Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, the Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists, edited by Jill Fields (New York: Routledge, 2011), pages 119–131
• “Meditation on Memory: Clark Johnson’s Boycott,” American Literary History, Volume 17, No. 3, Fall 2005, pages 530–541
• “To Sleep With Anger: Migration and Masculinity,” in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, edited by Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pages 814–829
• “Toni Morrison,” in African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pages 603–606
• “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction,” with Marianne Hirsch, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, Volume 28, No. 1, Autumn 2002, pages 1–20
• “Introduction,” in African American Writers (New York: Scribner's, 2001), pages xi–xxii 
• “Discourses of Family in Black Documentary Film,” in Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary, edited by Janet Cutler and Phyllis R. Klotman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pages 250–267
• “Photography, Narrative and Ideology in the Films of Billops and Hatch,” in The Familial Gaze, edited by Marianne Hirsch (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), pages 85–98
• “Andrea Lee,” and “African American Literary History: Late 20th Century,” in The Oxford Guide to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Trudier Harris, and Frances Smith Foster (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pages 429–430; 456–459
• “Black Masculinity, Labor, and Social Change,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, edited by Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), pages 119–126
• “Facing the Spectre of Racism,” Emerge, October 1994, pages 60–61
• “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing,” Diacritics, Volume 24, 1994, pages 43–57; reprinted in Feminist Consequences, edited by Elizabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pages 189–210
• “Telling Family Secrets: Narrative and Ideology in Suzanne Suzanne by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch,” in Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice Welsch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pages 380–390
• “Introduction,” in New Essays on Song of Solomon” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pages 1–18
• “'Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah (New York: Amistad Media Ltd. 1993), pages 342–355
• “Introduction,” in Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), pages ix–xxiv
• “The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African American Film,” in Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), pages 56–64
• “Introduction,” in African American Writers (New York: Scribner's, 1991), pages vii–xvii
• “Toni Morrison,” in American Writers Supplement III (New York: Scribner's, 1991)
• “Split Affinities: The Case of Interracial Rape,” in Conflicts in Feminism, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990), pages 271–287
• “'Loopholes of Retreat’: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1990), pages 128–137
• “Gender and Afro-Americanist Literary Criticism and Theory,” in Speaking of Gender, edited by Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pages 38–57; reprinted in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pages 482–498; reprinted in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pages 311–325; reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pages 369–84
• “Reconstituting the Image: The Emergent Black Woman Director,” Callaloo, Volume 11, No. IV, Fall 1988, pages 709–719
• “Alienation and Creativity in Native Son,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Richard Wright’s Native Son,” edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), pages 105–114
• “Introduction,” in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Schomburg Library of 19th-Century Black Women Writers edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pages xxvii–xl
• “The Meaning of Narration in Invisible Man,” in New Essays on Invisible Man, edited by Robert J. O’Meally (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pages 25–53; reprinted in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook, edited by John F. Callahan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)
• “The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” The Southern Review, Volume 21, No. III, Summer 1985, pages 721-732; reprinted in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Casebook, edited by Jan Furman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); reprinted as “Song of Solomon: Continuities of Community” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah (New York: Amistad Media Ltd., 1993), pages 274–283
• “David Bradley,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, (Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955), pages 28–32

Reviews

• “Gender Politics in the Black Community,” Review of Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities by Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Crisis, March/April 2003, page 42
• “Cautionary Tale of a Dark Future,” Review of Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson, Emerge, July/August 1998, page 71
• “A Personal, Political Poet,” Review of Kissing God Goodbye by June Jordan, Emerge, December/January 1998, pages 78–79
• “Race Passing and Impersonations,” Review of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture by Susan Gubar, Emerge, May 1997, pages 68, 70
• “Adult Aspirations, Childhood Dreams,” Review of Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven by Dawn Turner Trice, Emerge, March 1997, pages 78–79
• “Perspectives on Affirmative Action,” Review of The Affirmative Action Debate edited by George E. Curry, Emerge, September 1996, pages 84, 86
• “From Mother, With Love,” Review of Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter by Nozipo Maraire, Emerge, March 1996, pages 61, 63
• “Body in Motion: Bill T. Jones’ Dance with Life,” Review of Last Night on Earth by Bill T. Jones with Peggy Gillespie, Emerge, September 1995, pages 71–72
• “Dorothy West’s Family Album,” Review of The Richer, the Poorer by Dorothy West, Emerge, July/August 1995, pages 60–61
• “Island Requiem Sings of Colonial Past,” Review of Crossing the Mangrove by Maryse Conde, Emerge, December/January 1995, page 73
• “Vows Expose Color, Race and Class Complex,” Review of The Wedding by Dorothy West, Emerge, December/January 1995, page 73
• “Red Clay Breaks Mold of Black Women Writers,” Review of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers by Rebecca Carroll, Emerge, September 1994, page 74
• “Fragments Salutes Black Civil War Achievements,” Review of Fragments of the Ark, Louise Meriwether, Emerge, March 1994, page 60.
• “Finding Christa,” Review of Finding Christa by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch, Black Film Review, Volume 7, No. II, May 1992, pages 12–15
• “A Self-Critical Tradition,” Review of Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women (1860-1960), edited by Mary Helen Washington and Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, by Hazel V. Carby, The Women’s Review of Books Volume 5, No. V, February 1988, page 15
• “Dancing to Daddy’s Favorite Jam,” Review of Be-Bop, Re-Bop by Xam Wilson Cartier, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 13, 1987, page 12
• “Creating Connections,” Review of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker, Sewanee Review, Volume 93, No. II, Spring 1985, pages xxxi–xxxiv
• “Towards a Black Critical Tradition,” Review of Black Women Writers (1950-1980), edited by Mari Evans. The Women’s Review of Books Volume 2, No. III, Dec. 1984, page 6
• “Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley,” Review of Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, ed. William H. Robinson, Early American Literature, Volume 18, 1983, pages 110–111
• “Naming One’s Own Experience,” Review of Erma by Erma Calderon and Mary by Mary Mebane, Sewanee Review, Spring 1982, pages xxxvii–xxxix
• ​“Remembering One’s Ancient Properties,” Review of Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, Sewanee Review, Fall 1981, pages cxv–cxvii

Selected Papers

• “Women’s Leadership in Academia,” delivered at Hamilton College, 2014
• “The Recent History of African American Studies,” delivered at the 20th Anniversary Symposium of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and Columbia University, 2013
• “Race and Real Estate,” delivered at Africana Studies: The Future of the Field, University of Pennsylvania, 2013
• “Civil Rights Movement Memory and The Help” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, 2012
• “Trouble in Paradise,” delivered at University of North Carolina, Asheville; Ohio State University; The College of William and Mary; University of Washington, 2011
• “Sapphire’s Push and Precious,” Reid Family Writers of Color Series, Fordham University, 2010
• “The Ends of Intersectionality,” keynote address delivered at The End of "Other Studies?" Women and Gender Studies and the Future of Interdisciplinarity, Rutgers University, Newark, 2010
• “Civil Rights/Human Rights,” keynote address delivered at Japan Association of Black Studies, Hiroshima Jogakuin University, 2008
• “Race, Gender and History in A Raisin in the Sun,” delivered at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan, 2008
• “Civil Rights Movement Memory and the Arts,” delivered at Let Freedom Ring: Art and Democracy in the King Years, 1954–1968, Lannan Literary Symposium and Festival, Georgetown University, April 2008
• “Civil Rights Cold Cases,” delivered at Williams College and Hart Institute for American History, Pomona College, 2008; College of Wooster, 2010
• “Marketing the Movement,” delivered at Reading Photographs in Crisis, University of Leeds, U.K., December 2007
• “Dred Scott, Brown, and the Dynamics of Black Citizenship,” delivered at conference on 150th anniversary of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Harvard Law School, April 2007
• “Emmett Till’s Ring,” delivered at Objects and Memory workshop, Columbia University, March, 2007
• “Remembering ‘Birmingham Sunday:’ Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls,” delivered at University of Pennsylvania, University of Warsaw, Poland, American Historical Association 2006; University of Padua, Italy, Hiroshima Jogakuin University, Japan, 2008; College of Saint Elizabeth, 2009
• “Memory and the Civil Rights Movement,” delivered at University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cornell; University of Maryland, College Park; Bates; Kentucky; Wesleyan; Chicago
• “Critical Nostalgia in Clark Johnson’s Boycott,” delivered at Southern Historical Association Conference, October 2002
• “History and Memory: Recollecting the U.S. Civil Rights Movement,” delivered at West Virginia University, Georgia Southern University, Lincoln University
• “African American Fictional Autobiography and the Problem of Representativeness,” delivered at Hampshire College, May 2002
• “Response to Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul by Dale Peterson,” delivered at the Three Books Colloquium, Amherst College, October 2001
• “Memory, Nostalgia and the Civil Rights Movement,” delivered at the Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Pomona College, SUNY- Buffalo, Connecticut College, Columbia University, Vanderbilt University
• “No Place of Refuge: Memory, Narrative, and the Construction of Diaspora,” delivered at Diasporas Africaines dans L’Ancien et Le Nouveau Monde: Conscience et Imaginaire, the Sorbonne, Paris, October 2000
• “Narratives of Race in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” delivered at DePaul, Indiana, Princeton, Australia/New Zealand American Studies Association, 2000
• “Autobiographies of Women Civil Rights Activists,” delivered at 1998 International Association of University Professors of English, Durham, England; Constructions of Memory in Contemporary American Literature, Universite Paul Valery, Montpellier III, France 
• “Secrets and Daughters,” delivered at Dartmouth and 1998 International Conference on Narrative
• “Representing Authenticity: Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman,” delivered at Berkeley
• “Photography, Narrative and Ideology in the Films of Billops and Hatch,” delivered at Berkeley
• “Discourse of Family in Black Documentary Film,” delivered at Berkeley, Stanford, Rutgers, University of London 
• “Intersectionality and Black Experimental Documentary Film and Video,” delivered at Princeton, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins
• “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing,” delivered at Michigan, Pennsylvania, Yale
• “How Black is ‘Black Enough’: Race and Class in Contemporary Black Film Narratives of Passing,” delivered at Colorado, UC Irvine, Maryland, Pennsylvania
• “The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African American Cinema,” delivered at Black Popular Culture conference at DIA Center for the Arts
• “Telling Family Secrets: Narrative and Ideology in Suzanne Suzanne by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch,” delivered at Harvard, Princeton, SUNY-Stony Brook
• “Split Affinities: The Case of Interracial Rape,” delivered at Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Claremont College, UCLA, Wesleyan, University of California, Santa Cruz
• “'Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved,” delivered at Harvard (English Institute, 1989), Toronto
• “The Screen Persona of Whoopi Goldberg,” delivered at Brown
• “Slavery and Recent Afro-American Fiction,” delivered at Middlebury, Bryn Mawr College
• “The Black Woman as ‘Other’ in Literary Theoretical Discourse,” delivered at UCLA, Columbia, Northeastern, American Studies Association, 1988; Cornell
• “Gender and Afro-Americanist Literary Theory and Criticism,” delivered at Dartmouth (School for Criticism and Theory), University of Southampton, England
• “Black Women at Work: Race, Class and Gender in Films by Black Women Directors," delivered at Dartmouth, Virginia, Benedict, Rochester, Detroit Institute of Arts, Maine, Yale, Bates
• “Beyond Images and Imitation of Life: Representations of Race and Gender in Films by Black Women Directors,” UCLA, Kentucky, California State University, Long Beach
• “Writing Revolution: The '60s as Text in Contemporary Afro-American Fiction,” Dartmouth, Harvard
• “Black Women Writers and the Politics of Form,” MLA, ASA, 1985
• “'Loopholes of Retreat’: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” MLA, 1985
• “Fictionalizing the Self: Narrative Authority in Modern Afro-American Literature,” The Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, 1985
• “The Invisible Autobiographer,” CLA, 1984
• “'That Urge to Talk’: The Act of Speech in Native Son,” Columbia University
• “The Quest for and Discovery of Authority in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon," MLA, 1981

Other Professional Activity

• Member, Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science Leadership Council, 2015–present
• Member, Humanities External Advisory Panel, University of Oxford, 2013–14
• Member, Board of Trustees, McCarter Theatre Center, 2012–present
• Member, Board of Trustees, NJ Council for the Humanities, 2010–present
• Member, National Advisory Board, Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University, 2006–present
• Member, Pulitzer Prize Jury for Fiction, 2005–06
• Member, Final Selection Committee, Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Program, 2005
• Member, Board of Trustees, Bates College, 2004–present
• Academic Specialist, U. S. Department of State, assigned to Universities of Rome 3, Salerno, Padova, and Cagliari, May 2003
• Faculty Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University, 2002–06
• Member, Executive Committee, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University, 2002–11
• Member, MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize Committee, 2002–04; chair, 2004
• Member, MLA Foerster Prize Committee, 2001
• Member, Final Selection Committee, Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowships, 2001–present
• Member, Final Selection Committee, ACLS, 2001–03
• Member, Final Selection Committee for Postdoctoral Fellowships, Black Women in Church and Society Program, Interdenominational Theological Center, 2001-10.
• Co-organizer (with David Bailey), “Rhapsodies in Blax: The Harlem Renaissance and the Blaxploitation Movement, 1920s–1990s," Oct. 9–10, 1998, UCLA
• Member, Final Selection Committee, Mellon Graduate Fellowships in the Humanities, 1996–2000
• Film and Video Curator, Exhibition titled Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, November 1994–March 1995
• Curator, Program of African-American Films and Videos, The Los Angeles Festival, August-September 1993
• Member, Committee of Examiners for the GRE Literature in English Test, 1989–96
• Co-Organizer, Conference on Black Independent Film, The Whitney Museum of American Art, June 9, 1990
• Academic Specialist, United States Information Agency in Brazil, May–June 1988
• Lecturer, Eminent Scholar/Teacher Series (educational video series), Manly, Inc.
• Visiting Faculty, Black Scholars Program of Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Benedict College, November 1987
• Guest Curator, “The Black Woman Independent: Representations of Race and Gender” (program of 12 works by black women filmmakers and video artists), The Whitney Museum of American Art, December 1986–January 1987
• Member, National Advisory Board, Bibliography of United States Literature, 1989
• Member, Editorial Board, Black Periodical Fiction Project
• Member, MLA Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, 1987–90
• Member, Executive Committee, MLA Division of Black American Literature and Culture, 1986–91; chair, 1987–88

Consultantships

• Member, Editorial Board, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 2005
• Member, Editorial Board, Criticism, 2003
• Associate Editor, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, 2000–02
• Member, Editorial Board, American Literature, 1997–99
• Member, Editorial Board, Women: A Cultural Review, 1988
• Member, Editorial Board, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 1990–92
• Member, Editorial Board, African American Review (formerly Black American Literature Forum), 1986
• Member, Editorial Board, Contemporary American Fiction Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987
• Reader, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, American Quarterly, PMLA, Rutgers University Press, Oxford University Press, Temple University Press, Beacon Press, Princeton University Press, Cornell University Press, University of Chicago Press, Cambridge University Press, University Press of Virginia, State University of New York Press, Duke University Press, University of California Press, University of Minnesota Press