About
Dr. Joyce A. Joyce is one of the nation’s foremost leading scholars on African American Literary Criticism. Dr. Joyce is Professor of English at Temple University where she served as Chairperson of the Department of English from 2012 to 2015. She is a 1995 recipient of an American Book Award for
Literary Criticism for the collection of essays Warriors, Conjurers, and
Priests: Defining African-American Literary Criticism. Joyce earned her
Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia in 1979. Her other published books include Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy, Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition, and Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews.
Joyce taught for ten years at the University of Maryland-College Park, three years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and five years at Chicago State University where she was associate director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, coordinator of the Honors Program, and chairperson of the Black Studies Department. She was also chairperson of the Department of African-American Studies at Temple from 1997 to 2001.
In 2008, she gave one of two keynote presentations at the American Embassy in Paris at the “International Centennial Celebration of Richard Wright’s Birthday” and a keynote presentation at “Richard Wright 100,” an international conference held at the Universidade da Beira Interior in Coviha, Portugal. In June 2017, she delivered a presentation at the Colloquium for African-American Research (CAAR) at Malaga University in Malaga, Spain.
Though she prefers to teach undergraduate students, she teaches diverse graduate and undergraduate courses, such as The Harlem Renaissance; Black Women Writers and Spirituality; Global Black Lesbian Writers; Seminar in John A. Williams; Feminist Theory; The Poetry of Ewuare Osayande; Seminar on Sonia Sanchez; and African-American Literary Criticism. She has published articles on Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Arthur P. Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, E. Ethelbert Miller, Askia Toure, Gil Scott-Heron, and Sonia Sanchez.
Joyce's most recent completed project is the forthcoming edition of The Social Protests of 2020: Visceral Responses to Police Brutality, COVID-19, and Circumscribed Sexuality. Her papers are housed at the Odum Library, Valdosta State University.
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