Rudolph P. Byrd

Educated at Lewis & Clark College and Yale University, Rudolph P. Byrd is Professor of American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. He began his academic career at Carleton College where he was a member of the Department of English and Chair of the Program of African and African American Studies. He also has held a faculty appointment at the University of Delaware where he was a member of the Department of English. He joined the faculty of Emory University in 1991 where his service to the University included an appointment as Director of the then Program of African American Studies. Professor Byrd is the founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University.

Professor Byrd’s research interests are in American and African American literature, folklore, philosophy, gender studies, sexuality, photography, and the modern civil rights movement. He is the author and editor of six books: Jean Toomer’s Years With Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist (University of Georgia Press, 1990); Essentials: the Aphorisms of Jean Toomer ed. (University of Georgia Press, 1992; reprint Hill Street Press, 1999) with Charles Johnson; Generations in Black and White: Photographs of Carl Van Vechten from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection ed. (University of Georgia Press, 1993); I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson ed. (Indiana University Press, 1999); and Charles Johnson’s Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest (Indiana University Press, 2005). He is the co-editor with Beverly Guy-Sheftall of Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Indiana University Press, 2001). His current work-in-progress includes serving as an editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of African American Poetry edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. He is also editor of the forthcoming The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson (Random House, 2008) with a foreword by Charles Johnson. Professor Byrd is also editing with Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy Sheftall I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford University Press, 2008). With Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he is the co-editor of the forthcoming The Norton Edition of Cane. Professor Byrd is also writing a biography of Ernest J. Gaines and a study of the early fiction of Alice Walker. His articles, reviews and editorials have been published in African American Review, Callaloo, MELUS, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Professor Byrd’s several awards and fellowships include the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at Harvard University, the Dorothy Danforth Compton Fellowship at Yale University, Visiting Scholar at Boston University, and Visiting Scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.

An engaged scholar committed to service and scholarship at the national and local levels, Professor Byrd is a consultant to the United Negro College Fund/Andrew W. Mellon Programs. He is also a member of the National Advisory Board for the Morehouse College Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection. Professor Byrd is the founding co-chair of the Alice Walker Literary Society.