Herman Beavers, the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, recently assumed the presidency of the Modern Language Association.
Dr. Beavers has been a Penn faculty member since 1989. Throughout his career, he has also taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Sarah Lawrence College in New York, Trinity College in Connecticut, Princeton University in New Jersey, and the University of Kansas, where he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of English.
As a scholar, Dr. Beavers focuses his research and teaching on African American and American literature, including African American poetry, jazz, and southern modernism. He is the author of several poetry collections and books, including Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Additionally, Dr. Beavers serves as an advisory editor at African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, The Langston Hughes Review, and The Black Scholar.
Professor Beavers is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing at Brown University and both a master’s degree in African American studies and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale University.
