WRRC: Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Guy-Sheftall Named Appointed President of National Women's Organization

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D., has been named the president of the National Women's Studies Association, a professional organization that is "dedicated to leading the field of women's studies, as well as its teaching, learning, research, and service wherever they be found."

A member of the NWSA since its founding in 1977, Guy-Sheftall will oversee the Governing Council and policy implementation and general administration of the organization.

The NWSA was recently granted ongoing support form the Ford Foundation in the form of a two-year, $350,000 grant. The organization will use the grant to continue building organizational capacity, implement its strategic plan, and strengthen its Women of Color Leadership Project through collaboration with Spelman College.

Biographical Sketch
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies. She is also adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she teaches graduate courses.

At the age of sixteen, she entered Spelman College where she majored in English and minored in secondary education. After graduation with honors, she attended Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English. In 1968, she entered Atlanta to pursue a master’s degree in English; her thesis was entitled, “Faulkner’s Treatment of Women in His Major Novels.” A year later she began her first teaching job in the Department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1971 she returned to her alma mater Spelman College and joined the English Department.

She has published a number of texts within African American and Women’s Studies which have been noted as seminal works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Doubleday, 1980), which she coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1991); Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995); and an anthology she co-edited with Rudolph Byrd entitled Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Indiana University Press, 2001).

Her most recent publication is a book coauthored with Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (Random House, 2003). In 1983 she became founding co-editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women which was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent.

Dr. Sheftall reflects on being featured in Ms. magazine