Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature.
[1] She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University.
Trinidad-born intellectual-activist Claudia Jones (1915–1964) had long remained outside of academic consideration before Boyce Davies restored her to global, intellectual prominence.
Five hundred years of relocation and dislocation, of assimilation and separation has produced a rich tapestry of history and culture into which are woven people, places, and events.
This authoritative, accessible work reveals the strands of the tapestry, telling the story of diverse peoples, separated by time and distance, but retaining a commonality of origin and experience.
In collaboration with her former students Meredith Gadsby, Charles Peterson and Henrietta Williams, Boyce Davies edited Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies.
In the 21st century, this has become even clearer now that the academy remains one of the primary sites for the production and re-production of ideas that serve the interests of colonizing powers and its disciplines have yet to be decolonized.
In addition, it contends that this will be an ongoing project worthy of being undertaken in a variety of fields of study as we confront the challenges of the 21st century.
Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.
In 2008, her book Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008) won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for the best book on African American Women's History from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).