Tanya L. Shields

Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies

Director, Carolina Seminars

Education

PhD University of Maryland

Research Interests

Tanya Shields is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, an adjunct associate professor in the department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, a Carlyle Sitterson Freshman Teaching Awardee, and Director of Carolina Seminars, which supports faculty curiosity and collaboration.

Dr. Shields is a participant in the SoulWork Institute at the Kennedy Center as part of their Social Impact Programming. Developed by theater innovator Dr. Cristal Truscott, SoulWork is a theatrical method based on African American performance traditions and guided by the themes of ritual, repetition, and rehearsal, some of which were drawn from Dr. Shields’ book, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging (2014). This book uses feminist rehearsal as a methodology to examine the ways in which rehearsing historical events and archetypal characters shapes regional belonging.

Dr. Shields’ recent publications include “Writing and the Responsibility to Memory: The Role of White Female Planters in Contemporary Caribbean Novels” (2020) in Caribbean Literature in Transition, vol. 3, “Hell and Grace: Palimpsestic Belonging in The True History of Paradise and Crossing the Mangrove (2018), and “Magnolia Longing: The Plantation Tour as Palimpsest” (2017). She also recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Women, Gender and Families of Color (Summer 2023) with Belinda Deneen Wallace that uses the twenty-fifth anniversary of Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman as a springboard to discuss Black queer subjectivity and its representations across geographies and disciplines. A Fall 2023 special issue of Caribbean Quarterly that Dr. Shields co-edited with Isis Semaj-Hall is a festschrift honoring artist, activist, professor, and mentor Merle Collins. Her book chapter, “The Devil’s Wanga,” which is on 1930s race films and the depiction of Black female plantation owners will be published in December 2023 in the volume, Intersecting Aesthetics.

Dr. Shields’ second monograph, “Gendering the Manager: Sex, Race, and Power on Female Owned Plantations,” is a comparative study of women who owned plantations in the Caribbean and U.S. South.