Howard University taps Trinidad-born scholar with South Florida ties for prestigious role

Americas admin September 10, 2026 0 Comments

Howard University taps Trinidad-born scholar with South Florida ties for prestigious role

Carole Boyce-Davies, the distinguished Trinidadian-born scholar on Caribbean and African studies with deep ties to South Florida, is being honored with a prestigious endowed chair at Howard University in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s leading historically Black universities.

The school announced that Boyce-Davies will become the Eric Eustace Williams, Ph.D., Endowed Chair in Caribbean Studies. The appointment recognizes her international scholarship and contributions to Caribbean and African diaspora studies, while the chair honors the legacy of Eric Eustace Williams. A historian and scholar, Williams taught at Howard before becoming Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister after the country gained independence from Britain on Aug. 31, 1962.

Boyce-Davies is currently chair and professor of African Diaspora Literatures in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard. She is also the H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and serves as a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Havana.

Before joining the faculty at Howard in 2023, she taught at Cornell University, Northwestern University and Florida International University. At FIU she served as director of African New World Studies from 1997 to 2006 and co-founded the Eric Williams Lecture Series with Williams’ daughter, Erica Williams Connell. The series ran at FIU for 19 years before moving to the University of Texas in 2021.

“Doing the work without knowing future impact is what we should all see as part of our personal demands as scholar, writers, thinkers,” Boyce-Davies said of the honor and its connection to her years at FIU. “If what we contribute is recognized and is taken forward, we all benefit such as the beneficiaries of streams of prior intellectualism.”

The former president of the Caribbean Studies Association who organized its first conference in Haiti in 2016, she also notes that to be the founding Eric Williams Chair in Caribbean Studies not only speaks to Howard’s innovation but of its efforts to ensuring “the Caribbean is seen as a knowledge field.”

Boyce-Davies earned a master’s degree in African Studies from Howard University and a doctorate in African and Caribbean Literature in the English Department at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She also has an advanced postgraduate degree in International Law, with a concentration in Intercultural Human Rights Law from St. Thomas University in Miami.

The endowed chair continues Howard’s historic intellectual relationship with Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean, the university said in a release. It will provide a platform for scholarship, teaching, research and dialogue focused on the Caribbean and its global influence.

“Eric Williams understood that scholarship carries its greatest power when it moves beyond the academy and is put into service to people, communities and nations,” said Wayne A. I. Frederick, president emeritus and interim president of Howard University. “His years at Howard were an important chapter in a remarkable journey that ultimately helped shape the future of Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean.”

Carole Boyce-Davies, who divides her time between Miami and Washington, “represents that same tradition of rigorous scholarship, global engagement and service,” Frederick added. “Through this endowed chair, Howard University is ensuring that Dr. Williams’ intellectual legacy will continue through new scholarship, new ideas and generations of students who will deepen the connections between Howard, the Caribbean and the broader African diaspora.”

For Frederick, the appointment also carries personal significance. He was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago before enrolling at Howard as a student., and his own journey reflects the longstanding relationship between Howard and the Caribbean that the endowed chair seeks to preserve and strengthen.

Boyce-Davies will be formally installed during a ceremony at 1 p.m. Sept. 17 at Howard University’s the Oliver. The author of more than 100 essays and articles in academic journals, her most recent works including editing the anthology, “Black Feminist Theories: Transnational Approaches.” She has also written several books including the prize-wining “Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones,” “Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject”, “Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones” and the bilingual children’s story “Walking/An Avan,” published in English and Haitian-Creole.

Her works have also explored Africa and the African Diaspora, including the two-volume collection of critical and creative writing “Moving Beyond Boundaries.”