The College's recent hiring of two English professors will expand the course offerings in Afro-American literature.
Martin Favor, an African-American from the University of Michigan, and Deborah Chay, an Asian-American from Duke University, will also be teaching in the African and Afro-American studies department.
Favor will be teaching an English 5 class next term and a class on Charles Chesnutt, who is considered the first major black novelist and known for his portrayals of the complexities of slavery.
Favor completed his doctoral dissertation this past June on "Building Blacks: The Harlem Renaissance and Challenges to the Discourse of Black Identity," at the University of Michigan.
He has taught at Michigan, Williams College in Massachusetts and Carleton College in Minnesota, where he graduated magna cum laude. Favor said his interest in teaching developed from tutoring German and working at the composition center at Carleton.
Outside of literature, Favor is also fascinated with American cinema. He said he plans on incorporating movies into his courses.
Favor decided to study Afro-American literature because he "had the most to say" about it. "I think there are a lot of really stimulating intellectual things that have been overlooked frankly in this sort of writers, in this sort of literature," he said.
Both professors are "on the cutting edge of their scholarship field" and "are very good additions to this department," English Chair Lou Renza said.
Their interest in ethnic writing will "cover a lot of bases for us," Renza added.
Chay will be teaching a freshman composition class and a class on mulatto literature during the Fall term.
Chay graduated from the University of South Carolina and completed her doctoral dissertation last year on "Black Feminist Criticism and the Politics of Reading Jesse Fauset" at Duke.
She has primarily taught at Duke. Chay said her teaching interests include feminist theory, African-American women writers, Asian-American literature and literary criticisms.
"My interest is in African-American literature, in questions about race, ethnicity and gender, questions in the way race has been understood at different times, and the way racial categories have changed -- taking on different socio-political meaning especially in the United States where the American identity has both incorporated and resisted the ethnic differences," Chay said.
Even though Chay said "it is unusual for Asian-Americans to work in the languages in this country," she said she wants to "resist the idea that it should be strange an Asian-American woman would want to do this."
"Questions about why I, as an Asian-American woman, would want to go into English are relevant questions but they're not. And part of what I what to be doing here is to make them irrelevant questions," Chay said.
Chay said she never wanted to consciously become a teacher. "All through school, I just did what I wanted to do," she said.
"I like teaching, it can be a lot of fun and very exciting. The best kind of teaching experience is when [the class is] having a really great conversation going. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, but that's what I would like," she added.
The hiring of Favor and Chay highlights the College's commitment to increasing the diversity of its faculty.
Dean of Faculty James Wright said the College has been systematically trying to improve minority faculty recruitment for the last several years. "We've had some real success with all the departments in this regard," he said.
Wright added that the College's effort to recruit minority faculty members does not mean other non-minority candidates are shut out of the hiring pool.
"All we ask of our departments is to enlarge and enrich the pool of candidates ... Women and minorities are often times among the strongest candidates in that pool," he said.
