Deborah McDowell, the Alice Griffin Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has retired after nearly four decades of service to the university.
The first in her family to attend college, Professor McDowell earned her bachelor’s degree in English from historically Black Tuskegee Institute (now University) in Alabama. After completing her graduate studies at Purdue University in Indiana, she began teaching at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she was the only Black faculty member in the English department.
In 1987, Professor McDowell began her long career at the University of Virginia. She spent 13 years as director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, which initially housed the university’s African American studies program. Under Professor McDowell’s direction, the program ultimately gained departmental status in 2017.
A scholar of African American literature, Professor McDowell founded and edited Beacon Press’s African American Women Writers Series for eight years, reissuing 14 novels by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American writers. She also served as an editor for the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and wrote Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (Scribner, 1997), a family history about her hometown of Bessemer, Alabama.
Although she is retiring, Professor McDowell will continue to direct the Julian Bond Papers Project, which she began in 2013. The initiative aims to digitize, annotate, and publish the archives of Julian Bond, a civil rights leader and longtime professor at the University of Virginia, who died in 2015.
