Hazel V. Carby papers (Ms.2022.006)

Biographical/Historical Note

Hazel V. Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Yale University. A pioneering critic in the field of Black feminist studies focusing on race, gender, class, and diaspora, Carby has published extensive scholarship including five books: Multicultural Fictions (1980), Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987), Race Men: The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures (1998), Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (1999), and Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (2019).

Born in Okehampton, Devon, Great Britain to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Hazel Carby grew up with her parents Carl Colin Carby and Iris Muriel Carby in South London. She trained as a ballerina before pivoting to the study of literature. In 1970, she earned her Bachelor's degree in English and History at Portsmouth Polytechnic University (now University of Portsmouth). After supplementing that degree with a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education from London University's Institute of Education (1972), Carby taught secondary school in Newham from 1972-1979; a time when then-Secretary of Education Margaret Thatcher was beginning to dismantle social service policies in which Carby was invested. She moved on to pursue a Master's degree and then a PhD at the University of Birmingham, where she studied under the mentorship of foundational Black Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall in the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. During this time, Carby co-edited The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain and produced a groundbreaking dissertation called "Uplifting As They Write: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist" (1984), which would later become Reconstructing Womanhood.

Carby taught for the majority of her academic career at Yale University, beginning in 1981-1982 and then spanning from 1989 until her retirement in 2019. In 1982 she married Cultural Studies scholar and fellow Yale University Professor Michael Denning. They have one child: the anthropologist Nicholas Carby-Denning. From 1982-1989 Carby taught English at Wesleyan University.

Across her essential scholarship, Carby engages deeply with translatlantic questions of and historical materialist approaches to race, gender, sexuality, class, migration, empire, inheritance, and the narrative production of history. Her papers currently focus on her extensive academic career, with particular emphasis on her commitment to teaching and student mentorship, her participation in various councils and committees for Yale University's American Studies and African American Studies departments, her time directing Yale's Initiative for Race, Gender, and Globalization, her extensive research, and her participation in various conference and publication projects.