Faculty

Tiffany Ruby Patterson
Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies
Affiliated Faculty, Department of History
Faculty Head of Stambaugh House

PhD, Minnesota, 1995

African American and African Diaspora History with emphasis on colonialism and anti-colonial movements, migrations, social history of gender and color and the moral imaginations of intellectuals in the African Diaspora

Telephone:  343-6390 and 343-1755
Email:  t.ruby.patterson@Vanderbilt.Edu
Office Hours: email for an appointment
Office: 228 Buttrick Hall

Professor Tiffany Ruby Patterson is Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, and History, at Vanderbilt University. She is also Faculty Head of Stambaugh House in The Commons. She has published Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life, (Temple University Press, 2005), a study of early twentieth century black communities set within the history of all-black towns, maroon societies, and nationalist traditions.  She is also Associate Editor of the 16 Volume series Black Women in United States History. Her work on conceptualizing  the diaspora includes “Diaspora and Beyond: The Promise and Limitations of Black Transnational Studies in the United States” in Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain. Un état des lieux edited by W. Berthomiere and C. Chivallon. (Paris, Pessac, Editions Karthala and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 2006) and, co-authored with Robin D.G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review (April, 2000): 11-45. She has also co-authored with Tracy Sharpley-Whiting “The Conumdrum of Geography, or Diaspora Studies in Europe” in Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Keaton and Stephen Smalls eds. (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming, 2008). Professor Patterson is currently working on a collection of essays entitled Hearts in Darkness: Moral Imagination in the Writing of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston and history of the Gordon Family of Mississippi.  She is also developing a project on the meaning of color in the United States and Jamaica.

Professor Patterson teaches a range of courses including "Introduction to African American and Diaspora Studies," "African Atlantic Slave Trade," "The Making of the African Diaspora," and "The Black International."  For graduate students she teaches "Theories of Diaspora" and "Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World." In addition she is working on a study of the meanings of color in the United States and Jamaica and a history of the Gordon Family of Mississippi. For undergraduates, Professor Patterson teaches a range of courses including “Introduction to African American and Diaspora Studies,”  “Race and Gender in the Making of Colonial Empires, 1880-1940,”  “Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1900-1957,” “Labor, Migration, and the Colonial Situation in Post-emancipation Societies,” and “Paris Noir/Black Paris: African American Cosmopolitans in the City of Light, 1919-1939”.   For graduate students she teaches “The Making of the African Diaspora,” “Ethics and the Problem of Freedom,” and “Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World”. She has been the recipient of the Frederick Douglass Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Rochester, the Spelman/Princeton Fellowship at Princeton University and the Drescher Research Fellowship at Binghamton University.