New English professor hopes to boost Vanderbilt's ties to Fisk, TSU, other institutions

Thadious Davis, the new Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, hopes to boost interuniversity relations in Nashville, particularly with historically black institutions such as Fisk and Tennessee State University.

"I'm especially interested in forming some sort of working papers group that would bring scholars together several times a year to discuss our research and interests related to the African-American literary movement and cultural studies," said Davis, whose specialty is American literature with a particular interest in fiction, Southern writing and African-American literature.

Davis was recruited to Vanderbilt from Brown University, where she held the rank of full professor. Previously, she held a full professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jasper Neel, professor and chairman of the Vanderbilt Department of English, said, "With the appointments of Miriam Schancy and Shiela Smith McKoy last year, and Thadious Davis and Karen Shimakawa this year, the American literature section of the English department, in my opinion, is now one of the 10 best in the nation. And, of course, Thadious Davis will be one of the mainstays of that group."

Davis said she was attracted to Vanderbilt by the opportunity to collaborate with the English department's outstanding faculty, including several she has interacted with over the years and two African-Americans who were hired as junior faculty last year.

"This is a very exciting time to be studying literature because any literary project today almost necessarily becomes interdisciplinary, involving history, psychology, ethics, philosophy or art. Today's literary discourses are open and engaged with what's going on in the larger world. We consider a lot more material as texts," said Davis, who is using "Beloved" in her undergraduate seminar on the book's author, Toni Morrison.

Next semester, Davis plans to teach a graduate course on history and memory in literature. The course was received enthusiastically by students when she taught it previously at Brown.

"I'm interested in the way in which 20th century African-American women writers envision the 19th century, in particular slavery and reconstruction," Davis said. "There are ways of reading backwards to gain insights about how black, female authors view themselves as writers and artists."

Davis' most recent book, "Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled," (Louisiana State University Press, 1994) received the Anna Julia Cooper prize in women's studies from Spelman College in Atlanta and the award for creative scholarship from the College Language Association. It is her sixth book.

"It was doubly rewarding because the people who read it as a biography seemed to really like it," Davis said.

Writing the book was a slow process, begun in the early 1980s, of waiting for and following up on leads as Davis slowly pieced together "a lost life."

"With so little information available, I often wondered if I'd ever finish it or if it was even fair to call the project a biography," she said.

A prolific writer, Davis has authored introductions that will appear in new editions of several books due out this fall, including "Comedy: American Style," "The Chinaberry Tree" by Jessie Fauset and Taylor Gordon's autobiography "Born to Be."

Davis has had a lifelong love affair with the written word and began at age 7 to write poetry, which she continues today. In fact, she was the Phi Beta Kappa poet at Brown last year, which entailed a reading of her original poems.

Her other numerous accomplishments include fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Walt Whitman Chair in American Civilization at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands.