Sallie Southall Cotten Lecture

Little Old Ladies and the Last Word: An Exploration of Sassiness and Risque Behavior in African American Folklore

Dr. Trudier Harris is one of the most prominent and prolific scholars of African-American literature and culture.  

Dr. Harris taught at the College of William and Mary for six years before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to lecturing throughout the United States, Dr. Harris has lectured in Jamaica, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, England, and Northern Ireland. Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared from Beacon Press in 2003. 

From 1996-1997, Dr. Harris was a resident fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2000, she was presented with the William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2005, Dr. Harris won the UNC System Board of Governors' Award for Excellence in Teaching. Also in 2005, she received the John Hurt Fisher Award of the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English for her outstanding contributions to the field of English scholarship. Dr. Harris’ books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001).