Hazel Carby was born to Jamaican and Welsh parents in Okehampton, Devon, UK, on 15 January 1948.
She earned a BA degree in English and history from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970, then a PGCE in 1972, at the Institute of Education, London University.
[3] One of her contributions to African Diaspora studies came with her first book, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987).
Reconstructing Womanhood offers studies on black female writers including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Anna Cooper, and Ida B.
[4][5] Carby's 2019 book Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso) won the British Academy's 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.