Taken by: Martin Kane, UNCG Photography
Professor Tara T. Green is an award-winning teacher-mentor-scholar who has degrees in English from Louisiana State University (M.A., Ph.D) and Dillard University (BA). With nearly twenty-five years of teaching experience, she is currently Professor and former Director (2008-2016) of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Her areas of research include, Black gender studies, African American autobiographies and fiction (late nineteenth through contemporary), African women's literature, African American parent-child relationships, and African Americans in the South. Believing that research should explore major issues of the day, she considers how literature reflects current social and political concerns.
She is a prolific interdisciplinary scholar who has published numerous articles, four books and is the editor of two. Her most recently published book, Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song provides an interdisciplinary perspective on African descendants' resistance to social death during the Middle Passage and in spaces symbolic of the Middle Passage (Ohio State UP, April 27, 2018). Her book A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (winner of the 2011 Outstanding Scholarship in Africana Studies Award from the National Council for Black Studies), focuses on the impact of fatherlessness from the perspectives of Barack Obama and other Black men.
She has two forthcoming books. See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era discusses how Black women—Lena Horne, Yolande Du Bois, Memphis Minnie, and Moms Mabley— found pleasure in their personal and professional lives. Activism, Love, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson is a biography of the fascinating life and undervalued work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson who was born in New Orleans in 1875. She was an educator, writer, and suffragist who challenged the politics of respectability as she married three times and had love affairs with women.
Dr. Green is also the editor of two books: From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature — a look at the literary history that records ways in which African Americans have been confined and Presenting Oprah Winfrey, Her Films, and African American Literature — a study of Winfrey's role as a producer and/or actress. Inspired by her upbringing in the New Orleans area, she has completed a manuscript on New Orleans writer and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson forthcoming in 2022. Professor Green has presented her work throughout the United States and in Africa, England, and the Caribbean, as well as presentations to local schools and community, religious, and professional organizations.
Dr. Green is also a community-engaged scholar. During the fall of 2021, she co-led UNCG's Black Lives Matter Triad Collection project, which is an oral history archive of protestors' and organizers' interviews complemented by photos and art. She was the lead interviewer of the protestors and trained her students in her Black Lives Matter course to collect the stories of their peers.
Moving beyond the classroom, she has received recognition for her work as a mentor. She is an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., a Past President of the Langston Hughes Society, co-editor of Mercer University Press's Voices of the African Diaspora Series, a voting rights activist, and political news junkie.
Full CV Available Upon Request
She is a prolific interdisciplinary scholar who has published numerous articles, four books and is the editor of two. Her most recently published book, Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song provides an interdisciplinary perspective on African descendants' resistance to social death during the Middle Passage and in spaces symbolic of the Middle Passage (Ohio State UP, April 27, 2018). Her book A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (winner of the 2011 Outstanding Scholarship in Africana Studies Award from the National Council for Black Studies), focuses on the impact of fatherlessness from the perspectives of Barack Obama and other Black men.
She has two forthcoming books. See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era discusses how Black women—Lena Horne, Yolande Du Bois, Memphis Minnie, and Moms Mabley— found pleasure in their personal and professional lives. Activism, Love, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson is a biography of the fascinating life and undervalued work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson who was born in New Orleans in 1875. She was an educator, writer, and suffragist who challenged the politics of respectability as she married three times and had love affairs with women.
Dr. Green is also the editor of two books: From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature — a look at the literary history that records ways in which African Americans have been confined and Presenting Oprah Winfrey, Her Films, and African American Literature — a study of Winfrey's role as a producer and/or actress. Inspired by her upbringing in the New Orleans area, she has completed a manuscript on New Orleans writer and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson forthcoming in 2022. Professor Green has presented her work throughout the United States and in Africa, England, and the Caribbean, as well as presentations to local schools and community, religious, and professional organizations.
Dr. Green is also a community-engaged scholar. During the fall of 2021, she co-led UNCG's Black Lives Matter Triad Collection project, which is an oral history archive of protestors' and organizers' interviews complemented by photos and art. She was the lead interviewer of the protestors and trained her students in her Black Lives Matter course to collect the stories of their peers.
Moving beyond the classroom, she has received recognition for her work as a mentor. She is an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., a Past President of the Langston Hughes Society, co-editor of Mercer University Press's Voices of the African Diaspora Series, a voting rights activist, and political news junkie.
Full CV Available Upon Request
