Season 1, Episode 4: "Loving Black Women’s Work"- Drs. Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Erica Williams

Cite Black Women Podcast

In this special Valentine's Day/Black History Month Episode of the Cite Black Women podcast, we feature a conversation between collective member Dr. Erica Williams and the world renowned Black feminist scholar Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Listen to them discuss their #love for Black women's work, their passion for writing, the importance of friendship in the academy and collaborative research, and why Cite Black Women is a project that we need right now. Enjoy. Dr. ERICA LORRAINE WILLIAMS is Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology department at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. She is the author of Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize in 2011. She is also a co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology, along with Ira Harrison and Deborah Johnson-Simon(University of Illinois Press, 2018). She is Contributing Editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies (Sociology: Brazil section), and has published in Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook on Gender: Love, Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the Diaspora (2015), Policing Pleasure: Global Reflections on Sex Work and Public Policy(2011); and Taking Risks: Feminist Stories of Social Justice Research in the Americas(2014). She is currently working on a project on Afro-Brazilian feminist activism in Bahia, Brazil. Dr. BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL is founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College, adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies and past President of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). At the age of sixteen, Dr. Guy-Sheftall entered Spelman College where she majored in English and minored in secondary education. After graduating with honors, she attended Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English, and then went on to Atlanta University to pursue a master’s degree in English. Her thesis was entitled, “Faulkner’s Treatment of Women in His Major Novels.” A year later Dr. Guy-Sheftall began her first teaching job in the Department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1971 she returned to her alma mater, Spelman College, and joined the English Department. Dr. Guy-Sheftall has a long history of researching and writing about African American Women’s intellectual contributions. She co-edited the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith in 1979. In 1983 she became founding editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women which was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent, which was published from 1983-1996. In 1991 she published her dissertation Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920, and of course in 1995 she published her groundbreaking anthology, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought.