In 2016 she was appointed Vice Provost for Inclusion and Community Engagement at Arizona State University (ASU).
[3][4] James obtained her BA in sociology and history in 1971 from Spelman College, Atlanta, and her MA in 1972 from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she specialized in British colonial history in West Africa.
She returned to the United States and in 1984 completed a second MA, this time in international studies, at the University of Denver.
In 1989 she was awarded her PhD, also from Denver, for a thesis entitled Black Feminism: A Comparative Study of Women in Ghana and the United States.
She also argues that feminist approaches to FGM suffer from a "colonial flaw", a failure to recognize that similar practices, in the form of clitoridectomy and surgery on intersex children, have taken place in the United States.