I am Rafia Zafar, Professor of English and African & African American Studies and the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Currently I am faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, and I also have taught in the Netherlands as the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair (Utrecht University). My research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.
My book-length publications range from the U.S. long 19th century (God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor); Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (co-editor); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870); the early twentieth century (the two-volume edition of Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection); and a study of Black foodways from the early 19th to the late 20th century, Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning. I have also contributed essays to the New York Daily News, the Times Literary Supplement, and Gastronomica, among other venues.
