Charlotte Pierce-Baker

Charlotte Pierce-Baker is a native of Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. in English from Howard University and the Master’s degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences from Ohio State University. In 1985 at Temple University, she was awarded the Ph.D. in Speech Pathology and Applied Linguistics. Her Ph.D. thesis, on black, inner-city children acquiring first language phonology, was honored with a dissertation prize for “outstanding scholarship and service in the university and community.” Pierce-Baker has taught in Los Angeles, California; New Haven, Connecticut; Edinburgh, Scotland; Oxford, England; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; and Wilmington, Delaware. Since 1998, she has been on faculty at Duke University; in 2004 she was promoted to Research Professor in Women’s Studies and English at Duke. In July 2006 she will accept a position at Vanderbilt University as Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies with a secondary position as Professor of English. Dr. Pierce-Baker has published essays and commentary on literature and pedagogy in a variety of periodicals. She has been an active volunteer with victim-survivor services at Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) in Philadelphia; she is a participating member of Chicago’s “Voices and Faces Project” on rape and sexual assault. Pierce-Baker has been an active member of the Women’s Center at Duke University and liaison between the Duke Women’s Center and the Women’s Studies Program. Since the publication of her book, Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape (W.W. Norton, September 1998), Pierce-Baker has continued to travel and lecture on issues of black women and sexual assault and to teach courses on women, violence, and trauma. For Pierce-Baker, finding and creating a language is the first step to acknowledging and documenting the “colonization of the body of woman.” Surviving the Silence, the first of its kind, provides us with the heretofore-muted voices of African American women surviving the trauma of rape. Pierce-Baker’s book in progress, to be published by McGraw-Hill, is a family memoir of living with a son with bipolar disorder. Dr. Pierce-Baker resides with her husband, Houston Baker. They will be relocating to Nashville in Fall 2006.