Deborah E. McDowell (born 1951) is a scholar, author and member of the

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson and contains his The Lawn, Academical Village, a World H ...

faculty since 1987 where she serves as the Alice Griffin professor of Literary Studies. In 2008 professor McDowell was named director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, at the

.Bromley, Anne
"Deborah E. McDowell named Carter G. Goodson Institute Director at the University of Virginia."
UVA Today. April 23, 2008.

Early life

McDowell was born and raised in

Bessemer, Alabama Bessemer is a city in Jefferson County, Alabama, Jefferson County, Alabama, United States and a southwestern suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, Birmingham. The population was 26,019 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. It is within the Bi ...

. She wrote about her childhood in her debut memoir ''Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin''.

Academic and writing career

McDowell received a B.A. from

Tuskegee University Tuskegee University (Tuskegee or TU; formerly known as the Tuskegee Institute) is a private, historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama, United States. It was founded as a normal school for teachers on July 4, 1881, by the ...

, and M.A. and Ph.D. from

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

. She has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 1987. She founded the African-American Women Writers Series at

Beacon Press Beacon Press is an American left-wing non-profit book publisher. Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, it is currently a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It is known for publishing authors such as Jame ...

, and was its editor from 1985 to 1993. Deborah McDowell was featured in the documentary Unearthed and Understood. In 2018, she was awarded the Zintl Leadership Award by the Maxine Platzer Lynn Women's Center.

Publications

* (ed. with

Arnold Rampersad Arnold Rampersad (born 13 November 1941) is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The second volume (1989) of his ''Life of Langston Hughes'' was a finalist for the Pulitze ...

) ''Slavery and the Literary Imagination'' (Selected Papers from the English Institute) (1989) * (ed.) ''Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral'' (Black Women Writers Series), by

Jessie Redmon Fauset Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 – April 30, 1961) was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-Amer ...

(1990) * (ed.) ''Four Girls at Cottage City'', by Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers) (1991) * ''The Changing Same: Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory'' (1994) * ''Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin'',

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...

Scribners Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City that has published several notable American authors, including Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjor ...

(1997), * (ed.) ''Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass'', by

Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, February 14, 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was the most impor ...

. Oxford World's Classics (1999) * (ed. with Claudrena N. Harold and Juan Battle) ''The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration'' (Carter G. Woodson Institute Series) (2013)

References

External links

''Leaving Pipe Shop'' page at the University of Virginia website
People from Bessemer, Alabama American academics of English literature University of Virginia faculty Living people 1951 births American memoirists African-American non-fiction writers American non-fiction writers American women memoirists American women biographers Journalists from Alabama American women academics 21st-century African-American people 21st-century African-American women 20th-century African-American people 20th-century African-American women Writers from Jefferson County, Alabama {{US-English-academic-bio-stub