Jacqueline Goldsby, professor of English and professor of African American studies at Yale University, was named acting chair of the department of African American studies. Professor Goldsby is the author of A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Dr. Goldsby hold a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. She is a former winner of the William S. Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association and was a finalist for the Lora Romero First Book Prize of the American Studies Association. Before joining the faculty at Yale, Dr. Goldsby taught at the University of Chicago.
Professor Goldsby is co-editor of a forthcoming critical edition of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (W.W. Norton, November, 2014). She is also working on a book entitled Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s.