Thadious M. Davis
Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from Boston University. Her teaching areas include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race, region, and gender. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and Southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction. She is the author of Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2011), Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (2003), Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994; paper 1996) and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (1982), and the editor of numerous reference texts, including the Penguin Classic editions of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1997) and Quicksand (2002), and the co-edited Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992). Professor Davis is currently writing a monograph on Alice Walker for the Understanding Contemporary Authors Series, and serves as co-editor of the Gender and American Culture Series, University of North Carolina Press.
Ricardo Padrón
Ricardo Padrón is an Associate Professor of Spanish who studies the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly questions of empire, space, and cartography. His recently published monograph, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (2020) examines the role of Spanish writing about the Pacific and Asia in its ongoing conceptualization of the Indies as a geopolitical category. He is also the author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (2004), and he has published on early modern poetry and historiography, and on the mapping of imaginary worlds in modern times. Professor Padrón is an active member of the Renaissance Society of America, and is currently serving as a member of its Board of Directors.