Awards

Titled Professor - 2024

Gubar Chair

About Ayesha K. Hardison

Ayesha Hardison is the Susan D. Gubar chair and an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She explores questions of race, gender, genre, social politics, and historical memory in her research and teaching on African American literature and culture.

Hardison is the author of Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2014), winner of the Nancy Dasher Award and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Her current book project considers depictions of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in novels, film, art, and material culture. Additionally, she is co-editor with Eve Dunbar of African American Literature in Transition: 1930-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and has published several book chapters as well as articles in African American Review and Meridians.

She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, National Humanities Center Summer Residency Program, and the Ford Foundation. She is director of the History of Black Writing (HBW), a literary recovery and preservation digital humanities project, and co-editor of the multidisciplinary journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color.