Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D.

Join the Spelman College community on March 28, at 6:00 p.m., to view the documentary 'The Makers:  Women Who Make America,' in the Cosby Academic Center, Lower Level, Room 32.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D., founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, is featured in the AOLl/PBS documentary that first aired in February. 

The producers of 'Makers' hail Guy-Sheftall is a trailblazing pioneer. They say, "As one of the leading African-American feminist scholars of our time, Beverly Guy-Sheftall was instrumental in bringing the women’s studies movement to women of color, and the voices of women of color to women’s studies. Highlights from her forty-year academic career include the founding of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College in 1981, and the co-founding of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women in 1983."

Learn more about THE MAKERS: http://www.makers.com/

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 16, 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 University to pursue a master’s degree in English; her thesis was titled, “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, Ala. 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 co-edited 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 titled 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 that was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent.