Carolyn Denard, Ph.D.
Founder and Board Chair
Carolyn Denard received her BA in English from Jackson State University, her MAT in English from Indiana University, and her PhD in American Studies from Emory University, where she focused on twentieth century American literature and cultural history and where she completed a doctoral dissertation on Toni Morrison. She has held faculty and administrative positions at Georgia State University, Brown University, Connecticut College, Emory University, and Georgia College and State University. She has received post-doctoral research fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and the Women's Studies Program at Emory University. She is currently the Toni Morrison Senior Fellow in African Diaspora Literature and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute in Sharjah, UAE.
As founder of the Toni Morrison Society, Dr. Denard extended the invitation and led the efforts to establish the Society as an official author society of the American Literature Association in May 1993. Since the Society's founding, she has served as the Society's first president and as the Society's Board Chair, a position she has held since 1996. As Board Chair of the Toni Morrison Society, Dr. Denard has had oversight of Society's operations, fund raising initiatives and financial reporting; co-directed seven interdisciplinary Biennial Conferences in the U.S. and abroad and launched the Summer Symposium Initiative in 2024; launched and managed the Bench by the Road Project and the Toni Morrison Society Lecture Series; served as Co-project Director for the NEH-funded Language Matters Teaching Institutes; and provided leadership for a 17-member board of directors, consisting of leaders in the academic, arts, business, and lay communities.
Her scholarly research focuses on African American myths, ethics, and cultural tropes in Toni Morrison's fiction. A leading authority on Morrison, she has contributed to critical anthologies and essay collections on Morrison's work, and she is editor of What Moves at the Margin: Selected Non- Fiction by Toni Morrison (University Press of Mississippi 2008) and Toni Morrison: Conversations, a collection of interviews (University Press of Mississippi 2008). She is currently completing a book- length manuscript entitled Bearing Witness: An Ethnographic Study of Toni Morrison's Fiction.