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Biography

Dana A. Williams, Ph.D., is professor of African American Literature and dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. She earned her B.A. in English from Grambling State University in Grambling, LA in 1993, her M.A. in 1995 from Howard University, and her Ph.D. in African American Literature from Howard University in 1998. Before returning to Howard as a faculty member in 2003, Dr. Williams held academic appointments at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, as a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow and at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge as an assistant professor in the Department of English. In 2008-09, the year before she assumed the chairmanship of the Department of English at Howard, she was a faculty fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. In 2021, she was appointed the first female dean of the Graduate School.  

In addition to an annotated bibliography, Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 1999), Dr. Williams has co-edited August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2004) with Dr. Sandra G. Shannon, edited African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), Conversations with Leon Forrest (UP of Mississippi, 2007), and Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays (Ohio State UP, 2009).  She is also the author of In the Light of Likeness--Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (Ohio State UP, 2005).  

In addition to her book projects, Dr. Williams has published articles in CLA Journal, African American Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, Langston Hughes Review, Zora Neale Hurston Forum, Studies in American Fiction, International Journal of the Humanities, PMLA, and Profession. She is the 2nd vice-president of the Modern Languages Association, past president of the College Language Association--the oldest and largest professional organization for faculty of color who teach languages and literatures--president of the Toni Morrison Society, and a member of the board of directors for the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the Center for Black Fiction at Medgar Evers College, the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the Judge Alexander Williams Center for Education, Justice, and Ethics at the University of Maryland. In 2016, President Barack Obama nominated her to be a member of the National Humanities Council, and she is the recipient of a range of grant awards.