Duke Names Two Women as Visiting Faculty Fellows

Duke University has announced that the inaugural class of visiting faculty fellows of the Humanities Writ Large initiative, which is funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The three faculty members will spend the spring semester at Duke and will be invited back to Duke annually to participate in symposia with fellows from other years. Two of the first three fellows in the program are women.

Tess Chakkalakal is an assistant professor of Africana studies and English at Bowdoin College in Maine. She is developing an interdisciplinary curriculum for teaching the literature of the Jim Crow era.

Dr. Chakkalakal is a graduate of the University of Toronto. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English from York University. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Illinois Press).

Sharon Raynor is the Mott University Distinguished Professor at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. She will be conducting research on oral history projects.

Dr. Raynor holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from East Carolina University. She earned a Ph.D. in English at Indiana University.