Dr. Kalenda Eaton is a Professor in The Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and Director of Oklahoma Research for the Black Homesteader Project funded by the National Park Service in partnership with the Center for Great Plains Studies.
Dr. Eaton is a humanities scholar focused on African American western studies, intersections of Black literary studies and feminist criticism; African American social and cultural history; and Black Diaspora studies. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, and B.A. from Dillard University. She is the author of Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965-1980 and additional scholarship on representations of African Americans in American western history, literature, and popular culture. She is known for her teaching and public scholarship on what African American regional experiences can tell us about American cultural and national politics. Recent publications include “Black Women Writers Reclaiming Western Literature,” the co-edited New Directions in Black Western Studies, and “Teaching the Black West” (with Michael Johnson in Teaching Western American Literature).
Dr. Eaton is a Fulbright scholar, SSRC Mellon-Mays Fellow, and held the Steinbrucker Endowed Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences at Arcadia University from 2017-2019, where she also founded and directed a Humanities Research Lab. She has been appointed to key leadership positions at several universities and has over two decades of administrative experience in academic program management, graduate studies, undergraduate research, global studies (including international education), and digital humanities scholarship.
Courses frequently taught: The Black West; Africa and the Diaspora; Black Feminism and Womanism; Black Film; The Black Arts Movement; Major Black Writers; and The African Aesthetic.
Contact:
Email: k.eaton1@ou.edu
