Carolyn Denard, founder and board chair of the Toni Morrison Society, joins The Africa Institute as the 2025 Toni Morrison Senior Fellow in African Diaspora Literature and Cultural Studies. A scholar, educator, and longtime steward of Morrison’s literary legacy, Denard has spent decades advancing the study and public understanding of African American literature, with a particular focus on Morrison’s work.
Denard earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Emory University, where she wrote her dissertation on Toni Morrison, and completed postdoctoral work as a fellow at The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.
She has held academic and administrative appointments at Georgia State University, Brown University, Emory University, and Connecticut College, where she taught undergraduate courses in African American Literature and graduate seminars on Toni Morrison and led initiatives in curriculum development, student success, and institutional diversity. Throughout her career, she has mentored countless students and faculty, many of whom work in African American literary studies today.
As Founder of the Toni Morrison Society—established in 1993 and officially recognized by the American Literature Association—Denard has shaped the field through major projects such as the Toni Morrison Society Lecture Series, and the NEH-supported Language Matters Teaching Initiative and the Bench By the Road Project. Under her leadership, the Society has convened symposia on “International Perspectives on Toni Morrison,” held in Paris in conjunction with the “Foreigner’s Home” exhibit that Morrison curated at the Louvre in 2006 and in Martinique in 2024 on the works of Toni Morrison and Aime Cesaire. The Society has also hosted seven Interdisciplinary Biennial Conferences in the U.S. and abroad on Morrison, bringing together scholars, artists, and readers from around the world.
Denard is the editor of What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction by Toni Morrison and Toni Morrison: Conversations–two cornerstone texts in Morrison studies. She is also the author of many scholarly essays on Morrison's novels. Drawing on the works of cognitive theorists in cultural anthropology, Denard’s scholarship explores the function and meaning of the elements of African American culture that Morrison documents in her fiction: language, silence, myths, music, ethics, geography, and belief systems.
As the 2025 Toni Morrison Senior Fellow in African Diaspora Literature and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Denard will complete her book-length manuscript entitled Bearing Witness: Culture and Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.
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