Shirley Moody-Turner

Professional Bio

Shirley Moody-Turner is an associate professor of English and African American Studies and founding co-director, with Gabrielle Foreman, of the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk. She is interested in creating collaborative spaces to support digital scholarship and recovery work and in working across institutions and engaging various publics to do so. Through a Center for Humanities and Information grant, she worked with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University to digitize the Anna Julia Cooper papers and was a co-organizer, with project director Jim Casey, of Douglass Day 2020, which transcribed papers from the Anna Julia Cooper collection as a way to honor and celebrate Black women's contributions to movements for social justice. She has published numerous works in these areas, including Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, the co-edited volume, Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon, and African American Literature in Transition 1900-1910 (Cambridge University Press).  Most recently, she edited the Portable Anna Julia Cooper (Penguin-Random House 2022) bringing together writings across the long career of this visionary Black feminist, and is currently at work on an interpretive biography of Anna Julia Cooper for Yale University Press.  She co-directs the Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program and is a co-PI on the College of the Liberal Arts' Just Transformations Mellon Grant.

In Spring 2023 she was awarded a Shelia Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.