Deborah E. McDowell

Deborah E. McDowell is the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Virginia. A member of the faculty since 1987, she has written widely for both academic and general audiences. Her publications include ‘The Changing Same’: Studies in Fiction by African-American Women (1995), Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (1997), as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and scholarly editions, most recently Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1999). Extensively involved in editorial projects pertaining to the subject of African-American literature, she founded the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon Press and served as its editor from 1985-1993, overseeing the re-publication of fourteen novels from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She also served as a period editor for the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (1997), contributing editor to the D. C. Heath Anthology of American literature, and co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1988). Professor McDowell has been the recipient of various grants, including the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship (Radcliffe), the National Research Council Fellowship of the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship. She was elected to the Raven Society of the University of Virginia in 1998. Professor McDowell is active in the Charlottesville community and currently serves on the board of Literacy Volunteers of America, the Arts Council of PVCC, and is a reader for the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic.