Scholar Carol Boyce Davies to speak ‘Of Levees and Limits’ at Syracuse University Sept. 27

Scholar Carol Boyce Davies to speak ‘Of Levees and Limits’ at Syracuse University Sept. 27September 20, 2007Kelly Homan Rodoskikahoman@syr.edu

Carol Boyce Davies, an African and African New World Studies scholar, will give an address at Syracuse University on Thursday, Sept. 27, as part of the 2007 Syracuse Symposium, presented by SU’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Boyce Davies will speak on “Of Levees and Limits: Black Women, Leadership and Political Power” at 5 p.m. in Stolkin Auditorium in the Physics Building. The event, presented by the Department of African American Studies with support from the Ford Foundation, is free and open to the public. Free parking will be available in the Booth Garage.

Boyce Davies is professor of English and African New World Studies at Florida International University; she was director of African New World Studies for nine years. She has also been the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and professor of comparative literary studies and African American studies at Northwestern University. Prior to that, she was professor of English and Africana studies at Binghamton University.

She is the author of “Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject” (Routledge, 1994) and “Claudia Jones… Left of Karl Marx. The Politics and Poetics of a Black Communist Woman” (Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2007). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce Davies has also published the following critical editions: “Ngambika. Studies of Women in African Literature” (Africa World Press, 1986); “Out of Kumbla. Caribbean Women and Literature” (Africa World Press, 1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing titled “Moving Beyond Boundaries” (New York University Press, 1995).

Davies is co-editor of “The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities” (Indiana University Press, 1999) and “Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies” (Africa World Press, 2003). She is also general editor of The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming, 2007), a two-volume encyclopedia.

The Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival, hosted by SU’s College of Arts and Sciences, that celebrates interdisciplinary thinking, imagination and creation. The theme for the 2007 series is “Justice.”