Selwyn Cudjoe

Selwyn Cudjoe (born 1 December 1943)
Encyclopedia.com. is a Trinidadian academic, scholar, historian, essayist and editor who is Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. He was also the Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and the Marion Butler McClean Professor in the History of Ideas at Wellesley."Selwyn R. Cudjoe"
Wellesley College.
10 June 2010 (via Trinicenter.com). Cudjoe's particular expertise is Caribbean literature and Caribbean intellectual history, and he teaches courses on the African-American literary tradition, African literature, black women writers, and Caribbean literature.

Life and career

Selwyn Reginald Cudjoe was born in Tacarigua, Trinidad and Tobago, like several generations of his family,"History, heritage and green spaces"
''Sunday Express'' (Trinidad), 31 December 2013. Retrieved 22 January 2023. growing up on a sugar estate on which ancestors of his had worked. His parents were Lionel R. and Carmen Rose Cudjoe; his great-grandfather, Jonathon Cudjoe, was born in Tacarigua in 1833, the last year of formal slavery, and his great-grandmother, Amelia, was born in the same village in 1837.

Cudjoe attended Tacarigua EC School, before migrating to the US in 1964, at the age of 21. He continued his studies at Fordham University, where he received a B.A. in English (1969) and an M.A. in American Literature (1972), attended Columbia University (1971–72), and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in American Literature from Cornell University (1976). He has taught at Ithaca College and at Cornell, Harvard, Brandeis, Fordham, and Ohio universities, before joining the Wellesley College faculty in 1986. Cudjoe has also been a lecturer at Auburn State Prison and taught at Bedford-Stuyvesant Youth-In-Action.

He has served as a director of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago and as the president of the National Association for the Empowerment of African People (Trinidad and Tobago).

Writing

Among the many books Cudjoe has written are ''Caribbean Visionary: A. R. F. Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation'' (2011), ''The Role of Resistance in Caribbean Literature'' (2010), and ''Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago in the Nineteenth Century'' (2002). Cudjoe's 2018 book, ''The Slavemaster of Trinidad: William Hardin Burnley and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World'', is described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr as a "beautifully written and meticulously researched account of Burnley's life" that "unfolds the story of a planter who was born in America, educated in England, and made his fortune in the Caribbean. Measured in tone, this book not only exposes Burnley's public and private racism, but also places his life in context of the greater historical currents of the first half of the 19th century Atlantic world. Cudjoe has written a volume essential to a full understanding of the history of Trinidad." According to Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Keith Rowley, "Cudjoe's new book should be used as a teaching tool in all schools across the country." ''The Slavemaster of Trinidad'' was announced on the 2019 longlist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

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