Carole Boyce-Davies to Take Up Prestigious Caribbean Studies Chair at Howard University

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Trinidadian-born academic Carole Boyce-Davies has been appointed to a newly endowed chair in Caribbean Studies at Howard University, further recognising her contribution to the study of the Caribbean and African diaspora.

According to the Miami Herald, Howard University announced that Boyce-Davies will hold the Eric Eustace Williams, Ph.D., Endowed Chair in Caribbean Studies, a position named in honour of the late historian and Trinidad and Tobago statesman Eric Williams. Williams, who taught at Howard University, went on to become Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister when the country achieved independence from Britain in 1962.

Boyce-Davies is currently chair and professor of African Diaspora Literatures in Howard’s Department of Literature and Writing. She joined the university in 2023 after an academic career that included appointments at Cornell University, Northwestern University and Florida International University (FIU). At FIU, she directed African New World Studies from 1997 to 2006 and helped establish the Eric Williams Lecture Series with Williams’ daughter, Erica Williams Connell.

“Doing the work without knowing future impact is what we should all see as part of our personal demands as scholar, writers, thinkers,” Boyce-Davies said.

She added that when contributions are recognised and carried forward, “we all benefit” as beneficiaries of earlier generations of scholarship.

A former president of the Caribbean Studies Association, Boyce-Davies organised the association’s first conference in Haiti in 2016.

She said her appointment as the inaugural Eric Williams Chair is significant beyond the honour itself, pointing to Howard’s role in advancing Caribbean Studies as an established field of knowledge.

The appointment adds to Boyce-Davies’ extensive academic record. She is H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University, and also serves as a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Havana.

Her academic qualifications include a master’s degree in African Studies from Howard University and a doctorate in African and Caribbean Literature from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She also holds an advanced postgraduate degree in International Law, specialising in Intercultural Human Rights Law, from St. Thomas University in Miami.