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Vanessa Dickerson

Professor of English

Vanessa DickersonVanessa Dickerson, Professor of English and former Director of Black Studies, joined DePauw's faculty in 1997 after working at Rhodes College and the University of Virginia. She was educated at UVA and Princeton. Her numerous publications include Dark Victorians, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural, and two edited collections, Recovering the Black Female Body, co-edited with Michael Bennett, and Keeping the Victorian House, as well as articles on “The Naked Father in the Bluest Eye,” “The Erotics of Classroom Instruction in the Turn of the Screw,” Frankenstein, the figure of the Mammy, Gauguin, and money, among other topics. She is equally at home teaching Toni Morrison or Thomas Carlyle, and has been named a University Professor. More recently, she travelled to Japan where she began her exploration of the relations between African Americans and the Japanese.