Faculty

Profile

Gabrielle Williams is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Eugene Lang College (ELC), a Leadership Council Member for the Andrew W. Mellon Initiative for Faculty Excellence, a Provostial Faculty Fellow, and a DEI & EISJ conflict resolution advisor to faculty, students, and administrative staff at TNS. She teaches undergraduate courses in African American, African Diaspora, and “classic” literatures with a focus on aesthetics, critical race theories, disability studies, food studies, discourses of blackness, poetics, performance studies, queer studies, and rhetoric.    Dr. Williams has a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from TNS, an MA in African American Studies from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in African American & African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley. As well, she completed a fellowship sponsored post as a Visiting Scholar in the Taught MA Anthropology of Food program at SOAS, University of London. Prior to her work in academia, Dr. Williams pursued a long-term career as a Contemporary Modern dancer. Given the diversity of her training in aesthetic and intellectual arts, her approach to research, teaching, and service is community-facing, holistic, interdisciplinary, and social-justice seeking. Courses that she has devised & taught at ELC such as, Flies in the Buttermilk: Food, Power, and Hunger in Africana Literature, Ugly: Distorted Aesthetics of Exquisite Blackness, and, The Revelation and the Word: Toni Morrison & Language, reflect Dr. Williams' fluid disciplinarity.    Dr. Williams has directed, mentored, and taught for several educational initiatives geared toward assuring success for disabled, first-generation, justice-impacted, LGBTQIA+, undocumented, and other marginalized campus populations. She has also received extensive training in a variety of approaches to conflict & crisis resolution management for small- and large-scale occurences relevant to DEI & EISJ issues.   Currently, Dr. Williams is completing a manuscript surrounding her research interests in portrayals of phenomenological hunger in Africana novels. She is also working on a collection of experimental prose poems.       

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