Piper Kendrix-Williams, Ph. D

Dr. Piper Kendrix Williams is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies and English Department at the college of New Jersey in Ewing, NJ. At the College she teaches various classes on topics in 19th and 20th Century African American Literature African Diaspora Literature and Multicultural Studies. She received her doctorate from Rutgers University’s Literatures in English Department in October 2002. Dr. Williams’ dissertation, entitled “‘Looking for what was before’: Disrupting Maps of the African Diaspora in Black Women’s Writing,” focused on the style in which the African Diaspora is “imagined” in the works of contemporary black women writers. Her article “Journeys of Détour in Maryse Condé’s A Season in Rihata,” appears in the September 2004 edition of Canadian Woman Studies, Vol. 23, Number 2. Her current research focuses on the investigation of passing as a racial as well as American phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries. Dr. Williams earned a BA from Spelman College in English in 1994.