Adenike M. Davidson

Adenike Marie Davidson is currently a professor of English and Gender Studies and serves as the Interim Dean of the College of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences at Delaware State University. She has also worked at Fisk University as Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois General Honors Program and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Minor and at the University of Central Florida. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a focus on American and African American Literature and concentrations in Literary Theory and Gender; her M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA, and her B.A. in English from the College of the Holy Cross. She has one published single-authored book, The Black Nation Novel: Imagining Homeplaces in Early African American Literature (Third World Press: 2008), and several journal articles. Her scholarship focuses on reclaiming lost voices and texts, understanding race and gender across texts and eras, and connecting canonical and non-canonical texts to further examine the American experience. Her current research projects include a book manuscript examining the collaborations between New Negro artists, Negritude artists, and New African artists in print and nurtured by female writers and editors such as Jessie Fauset and the Nardal sisters; autonomy and empowerment in enslaved mothers; and the genre of Black horror, generational trauma, and mental illness. Moreover, she is also currently interested in the resistance of students and administration at HBCUs toward Gender and LGBT studies on our campuses.