University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

In A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, Anna Julia Cooper argues that in a democracy, the most neglected and marginalized are the true measure of that democracy's ability to realize its professed ideals. From her position as a black woman of the South, she offered an incisive critique of systems of oppression and domination, and championed education as one avenue through which those on the margins might transform the center. Her theories regarding the operations of power at the intersections of race, gender and class have served as a foundation for both what I study and how I study it. The degree to which Cooper, as an activist and educator, put into practice in her communities the philosophies she articulated in her scholarship, has served as a model of engaged scholarship I strive to emulate.