Emily Bernard
Black and White Friendship
Emily Bernard, author of Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (paperback available July 2005), Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (2001) and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (2009). She is Associate Professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies.
Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letter of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (2001), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (2004) was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age, 2006. Her essays have been published in several journals and anthologies, such as The American Scholar, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Non-Fiction.
Bernard has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. In 2008-9, Bernard was the James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, a book she co-authored with Deborah Willis, was published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2009. Another book, White Shadows: Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance, will be published by Yale University Press in 2010.
Her teaching interests include African-American literature and culture, race and ethnicity in American literature, 19th and 20th Century race and ethnicity theory and women's literature, multiculturalism, modern American and 19th Century American literature and culture, and women's studies. Her doctorate in American studies is from Yale University and she taught African-American studies at Smith College before joining the UVM English faculty where she teaches courses on race and ethnicity in literary studies, the Harlem Renaissance, and African-American literature.
Areas of Specialty: African-American literature & culture; race & ethnicity in American literature; 19th & 20th Century women's literature
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