Tara T. Green is Distinguished Professor and Chair of African American Studies (starting Fall 2022) at the University of Houston. She teaches literature and Black women’s studies courses and her research areas of specialty include Black parent-child relationships, Black leadership and activism, and Black liberation.

Inspired by her Southern upbringing, Dr. Green is a lover of storytelling—the preservation, creation, and analysis of Black voices. She holds degrees in English from Dillard University of New Orleans and Louisiana State University. At the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she worked with librarians to expand the archival presence of the local Black community. In one project, she and her students interviewed Black Lives Matter protestors and organizers to build the Triad Black Lives Matter collection. She is currently working with the library to preserve the collections of Black churches and women-led organizations.

Dr. Green is a prolific award-winning author. She has published six books, two special journal issues, and is the author of over twenty peer-reviewed articles. Her book A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men received the 2011 Outstanding Scholarship in Africana Studies Award from the National Council for Black Studies. The book focuses on the impact fatherlessness had on Barack Obama, Langston Hughes, Malcom X, and Richard Wright. In 2018, she published Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song, which provides an interdisciplinary perspective on African descendants’ resistance to social death beginning with the transatlantic slave trade. She has edited two books, From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature and Presenting Oprah Winfrey, Her Films, and African American Literature. Her forthcoming books See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era (Rutgers UP, 2022) and Love, Activism and The Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2022) look specifically at how Black women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century navigated the politics of respectability to live on their own terms.

Dr. Green was reared in the suburbs of New Orleans and has taught at universities in Louisiana, Arizona and North Carolina. She has presented her research to diverse audiences from local schools and organizations to corporations, and at universities in Africa, the Caribbean, and England. Moving beyond her research, she has received awards for her work as a mentor and her service in African American Studies. She is also co-editor of Mercer University Press’s Voices of the African Diaspora Series.

TOPICS: Activism, Race, Women& Girls of Color,