Please join us in warmly welcoming Professor Erin Gray to the UC Davis English Department faculty.

Gray begins teaching in the department this year after spending the last two years conducting research supported by back-to-back prestigious postdoctoral fellowships: a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine and a Dean's Fellowship in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Gray earned her PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of racial and gender formations in the United States. Her scholarship has appeared in the vital Black Studies journal The Black Scholar and in the international venue The Journal of Global Slavery.

Gray is a poet as well as a scholar and will collaborate with her new English colleague Professor Margaret Ronda to moderate a round table of poet-educators for the first fall event of the ongoing Mellon Initiative on Racial Capitalism. (This round table, "Refusing Racial Capitalism: Poetic Erasure and Redaction," is on Wednesday, October 2 in Voorhies 126. You can sign up to receive details about this event and others associated with the initiative on the Racial Capitalism website.)

This year, Gray is teaching undergraduate classes on 20th Century African American Poetry (Winter 2020) and Black Feminist Cultural Production (Spring 2020) as well as offering a graduate seminar in the spring quarter.

Welcome Erin!