Christel N. Temple

Christel N. Temple is Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Black Studies. She is an historian and cultural theorist who works at the intersection of History and Literature with specializations in cultural memory, Pan-Africanism, critical auto-/biography, autoethnography, Africana womanism, global Black Theatre, and Afroeuropean Studies. She began her career simultaneously as a scholar and as an actor with The Jazz Actors Theatre of Richmond (VA), where, under the leadership of acclaimed Black Arts director and innovator Ernie McClintock, she embraced the merged socio-historical and aesthetic models of the Black Arts and Black Aesthetic Movements that inevitably influenced her intellectual worldview at the intersection of History and Literature.

She is the author of two award-winning monographs: Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism (2005, recipient of the 2006 Best Book Award, Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference), which examines the history and cultural aesthetics of how continental Africans learned of the fate of enslaved and relocated Africans who were dispersed throughout the Diaspora, and Black Cultural Mythology (2020, recipient of the 2021 Book Award, College Language Association), which defines the 200+ year history (since the Haitian Revolution and David Walker’s Appeal) and introduces the subfield of Africana Cultural Memory Studies. Adding momentum to the new conceptual framework of Black cultural mythology, her co-edited volume (with James L. Conyers, Jr.), Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory (2022), featuring her essay “‘Something Greater than Pride’: Black Cultural Mythology and Muhammad Ali,” adds an additional icon to her critical biography studies on legendary figures, which include Charles Hamilton Houston, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, John Henrik Clarke, Frederick Douglass’s lineage, A. Leon Higginbotham, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Also, she has extended her cultural memory conceptual framework to the Black British experience in a contemporary article on “Africana Cultural Memory in the Afroeuropean Context” (2021).

Additionally, her 2017 monograph, Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise, features new critical readings of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk; the international media effect of Malcolm X’s legacy; cultural memory in Paul Robeson’s memoir and documentary; Pan-African folk culture; Black liberation theology; the psychology of social justice; and Womanist Hip-Hop activism. Her critical anthology, Literary Spaces: Introduction to Comparative Black Literature (2007) presents comparative selections from creative writers as well as the canon’s historical essay and speech traditions from leaders and activists such as Marcus Garvey (Jamaica/US), Hilary Teague (Liberia), Dennis Brutus (South Africa), Maurice Bishop (Grenada), Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Yelena Khanga (Russia), and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria).

Dr. Temple is well-known for her groundbreaking Sankofa study, “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice in the United States: A Modern History” (2010), which pairs with her Afroeuropean study on “Using Sankofa as a Literary Paradigm” (2008). She has published autoethnographic work on her Afro-German heritage as well as on her merged Southern (Richmond, VA) and Lowcountry (Charleston, SC) genealogical inheritances. Her current historical work-in-progress is Black Love and the Law.

She has served at the University of Pittsburgh since 2010 and teaches culture and historiography topics such as African American Folk Culture, Africana Cultural Memory, Literary Pan-Africanism, and Critical Africana Pedagogy, as well as the Department’s African American Theater course. Dr. Temple has a notable corpus of theatre scholarship on the works of Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and Robert O’Hara, and on the history of opera and Broadway productions of Guiseppe Verdi’s Aida.