Karla FC Holloway

A - J

Feb 13

Karla FC Holloway, PhD, MLS, is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Duke University, a title that, like her career, contains multitudes. Her scholarly profile has explored the intersections of African American literary and cultural studies, law, bioethics, and gender studies. She has held appointments at Duke in both Law, the African & African American studies, English, and women’s studies. In addition, she has served as dean of the humanities and social sciences, in board positions at the Greenwall Foundation’s advisory board in bioethics, Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, North Carolina Humanities Council, and Princeton University’s Council on the Study of Women and Gender. Dr. Holloway has held numerous fellowships, including a Ford Foundation fellowship to work with Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency at The Bellagio Center. She was a contributing author to Dying in America (2015). In 2007, she was responsible for the word “vilomah,” a nominative for a parent whose child has died, entering the English lexicon.

Dr. Holloway has published ten books, spanning academic monographs, life writing, and, in most recent years, creative fiction. Her books include the novels Gone Missing in Harlem (a Publishers Weekly starred review) and A Death in Harlem, both mysteries set in early twentieth-century Harlem. A Death in Harlem, a Harlem Renaissance-era murder mystery introduces readers to secret societies, the intricacies of racial passing, and a memorable Harlem detective. Gone Missing in Harlem sees that same detective unearthing family secrets as he works the case of a missing child.

Her nonfiction, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, about rituals of mourning, dying, and the “death care” industry, and Holloway’s memoir, BookMarks: Reading in Black and White, were Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalists. In Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature, Holloway explores the shared terrain between US constitutional law and African American fiction. Private Bodies/Public Texts is a study in the right to privacy grounded in cultural biothethics. Holloway has also published in newspaper op eds, African American Review, and the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

This array of creative, autobiographical, and scholarly output frames the depth and importance of Holloway’s contributions across an uncommonly broad range of fields. Her engagements with law and bioethics extended the reach of Black Studies at a crucial time in that discipline’s rise. Her work persistently exposes the common threads that link concepts of privacy, legal constructions of racial identity, and bodily autonomy, both by theorizing them from different scholarly vantage points and by building literary worlds where these concepts and constructions emerge through fictional family dramas and mysteries. Holloway turns again and again to the most intimate spheres of Black life: the ways families form, the ways they sometimes break apart, the ways people find joy, and the ways they mourn loss.

This range of her scholarly and creative work is a testament to Dr. Holloway’s intellectual vibrance and innovation. Her recent turn to fiction functions as a site of Black feminist experimentation. Visit www.thethursdaylady.com to learn more.