Dr. Katherine Clay Bassard served Rhodes College as Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs from 2020-23. She is the author of two books: Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in Early African American Women鈥檚 Writing (Princeton U.P.: 1990); Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible (University of Georgia, 2010); and the editor of Sketches of Slave Life and From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit by Peter Randolph (West Virginia U.P. 2016). She has published over a dozen articles and delivered numerous invited lectures and keynote addresses. She is the winner of Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Humanities in the Public Interest Fellowship; a Pew Evangelical Scholars Fellowship; and a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship, National Research Council. She is recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Dr. Bassard has taught courses in African American literature and culture at the University of California, Berkeley and Virginia Commonwealth University. A highlight for her as a teacher, upon the death of Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison in 2019, was hearing from students who thanked her for introducing them to her novels.
Selected Articles:
鈥淭he Significance of Signifying: Vernacular Theory and the Creation of Early African American Literary Study.鈥 Early American Literature 509:3, 2015: 849-54.
鈥淎 Riff, A Call and A Response: Race and the Mind/Body Problem鈥 Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 31, no. 1, Spring 2014: 73-75.
鈥淎nd the Greatest of These: Toni Morrison, the Bible, Love鈥, in eds. Adrienne Seward and Justine Tally, Memory and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Toni Morrison, University Press of Mississippi, 2014: 119-131.
鈥淩eading Between the Lines in Neo-Slave Narratives鈥 in ed. Angelica Duran, The King James Bible: Across Centuries, Across Borders Duquesne University Press, Fall 2014.
鈥溾橝nd the Greatest of These: Toni Morrison, The Bible, Love鈥 Feschrift to Honor the 80th Birthday of Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison Society, February 18, 2011.
鈥淪igns and Wonders: The King James Bible and African American Literature鈥 eds. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge U.P., 2010): 294-317.
鈥淚magining Other Worlds: Race, Gender and the 鈥楶ower Line鈥 in Edward P. Jones鈥 The Known World鈥 vol. 42, no. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2008): 407-20.
Media Appearances:
鈥淭hings Not Seen鈥 radio show, Host, David Dault, Memphis TN, October 14, 2012
Guest column, 鈥淔aith in Memphis鈥 section of Memphis Commercial Appeal, Oct. 14, 2012
With Good Reason, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities [streaming audio], 2011
