The Yale Henry Koerner Center wishes to extend congratulations to Hazel V. Carby on her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the most prestigious honor societies in the country. Professor Carby is one of nine Yale faculty to be elected in 2023. Members of the academy are drawn from academia, the arts, industry, policy, research, and science.
Founded in 1780, the academy “honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together ‘to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.’”
Professor Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and professor emeritus of American Studies at Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and Honorary Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Currently Centennial Professor at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, 2022–2024, she was the Roth Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Dartmouth College, 2021–2022.
Her most recent book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019), was awarded the British Academy’s Nayef Al Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding in 2020. It was selected as one of the “Books of the Year for 2019” by the Times Literary Supplement and #1 of “Top Ten Books About Aftermath of Empire” by The Guardian on July 14, 2021. Her current project is provisionally titled Futurity and the Political Ecology of Art.
Professor Carby’s recent honors include the DeVane Medal, Yale Phi Beta Kappa, 2021; election to Honorary Fellow, Learned Society of Wales, 2021; finalist for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, ASA, 2020; Highly Commended for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, 2020; honorary degree of Doctor of Letters awarded from Wesleyan University, 2019; the Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award, Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2019; and the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American Literature, MLA, 2016.
Her previous books are Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (1999); Race Men (1998); Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987); and she is also a co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).
Recent articles include “Redefining American Art,” This Land, Hood Museum, University of Washington Press (forthcoming); “Exposure,” Diaspora and the Modern, October Journal (forthcoming, fall 2023); “Foreword,” Charlotte Williams, Sugar and Slate, Library of Wales, 2022; “We must burn them,” London Review of Books, 44, 10, May 26, 2022; “Imperial Intimacies – further thoughts,” Small Axe, 64, March 2021: 198-203; “Between Black and White,” London Review of Books, 43, 2, January 2021; “Black Futurities: Shapeshifting Beyond the Limits of the Human,” Invisible Culture, 31, November 2020; “The National Archives,” Invisible Culture, 31, November 2020; “Peine forte et dure,” London Review of Books, 42, 1530, July 2020; “Safe? At Home?, Feminist Review, July 6, 2020; “Errant Daughters: A Conversation between Saidiya Hartman and Hazel Carby,” The Paris Review, January 21, 2020; and “A war half won,” The Guardian (Weekend), November 16, 2019, pp. 62-63.
To read the election announcement in Yale News, click here.