Dana A. Williams
President
Dana A. Williams was elected second vice president of the MLA in December 2021. Her term as president runs from January 2024 through January 2025. She has previously served on the MLA Executive Council and the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada. She was president of the Association of Departments of English for 2014–15.
Williams is the dean of the Graduate School and professor of African American Literature at Howard University. She has previously held positions at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Duke University; and Northwestern University. Williams received her PhD from Howard University.
Her research focuses on African American literature, including contemporary African American fiction and drama. Williams is the author of In the Light of Likeness—Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (2005). She is the editor of African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking (2007), Conversations with Leon Forrest (2007), and Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays (2009) and is the coeditor of August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (2004). She has contributed to numerous volumes, including August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle (2010), Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (2013), Memory and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Toni Morrison on Her 80th Birthday (2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (2014), and Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson (2016). Her work has appeared in PMLA, African American Review, College Language Association Journal, Zora Neale Hurston Forum, Bulletin of Bibliography, Studies in American Fiction, Profession, Langston Hughes Review, American Literary History, VP Annual, ADE Bulletin, and International Journal of the Humanities.
Williams is the president of the Toni Morrison Society and was the president of the College Language Association from 2014 to 2016. She is a member of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, including four grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.