Andreá N. Williams

Andreá N. Williams is director of The Women’s Place. Since joining The Ohio State University in 2006, Andreá has served widely on college and university committees and contributed to initiatives dedicated to diversity, inclusion and women’s advancement. She was recognized with the university’s Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award in 2016.

Andreá is an associate professor in the Department of English, specializing in African American and nineteenth-century American literature. As a literary historian, Andreá is drawn to questions about the social and material conditions that historically have enabled or inhibited African Americans in producing literature and art. She is the author of Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (2013). Her current work traces the lives and literature of unmarried African American women who helped to cultivate singleness as a viable long-term lifestyle in the twentieth century. Andreá’s research has been awarded grants and fellowships from Rutgers University, the National Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Andreá is an alumna of Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, and earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.