Kim F. Hall

Kim F. Hall is Professor of Africana Studies and Lucyle Hook Chair of English at Barnard College. Her research and teaching encompasses Renaissance/Early Modern Culture, Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Food Studies and Visual Culture. Her book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England was the first to read early modern texts through a black feminist lens. She is also the editor of Othello: Texts and Contexts. She has held ACLS, Ford Foundation and NEH sponsored grants and is currently working on two book projects: Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Gender and Race, which examines the roles of labor, race and genre in the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the seventeenth century, and “Othello was my grandfather”: Shakespeare in the African Diaspora. Additionally, she runs the Digital Shange Project, an interdisciplinary project that gives undergraduate students the tools to create digital stories based on archival research in the Ntozake Shange papers at Barnard College and other Harlem archives. She was named the inaugural Faculty Partner of the Year by the Barnard College library and is the winner of the college’s 2015 Tow Award for Innovative Pedagogy. Kim is an avid quilter whose work has been on display in Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and South Carolina.