Rafia Zafar

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her publications include God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor; Mercer 1990); Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (co-editor; Cambridge UP, 1996); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870 (Columbia UP, 1997); and Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection (two volumes; Library of America, 2011). She has also published several essays on food and American literary identity. Zafar has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Virginia Center for the Humanities and in 2007 held the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In 2014-2015 she was NEH Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Her administrative portfolio at Washington University has included Director of the Program in African & African American Studies (1999-2003) and Director of Undergraduate Honors in the Department of English (2007-2010). From 2011 to 2014 she served as Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusiveness, where she directed the Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship program, aimed at increasing the number of under-represented groups in academic positions, and worked to expand and develop other minority recruitment and diversity initiatives for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning (2019, University of Georgia Press).