Williams–Forson, Psyche A.

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Williams-Forson, Psyche A.

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Virginia, B.A., 1987; University of Maryland, M.A., 1994, Ph.D., 2002.

ADDRESSES:

Office—American Studies Department, University of Maryland, 1102 Holzapfel Hall, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Maryland, College Park, American Studies Department, assistant professor, Women's Study Department, affiliate faculty member.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ford Foundation, 2005; Francis Lewis Fellowship in Women's Studies, Virginia Historical Society, 2003; Lord Baltimore Research Fellowship, Maryland Historical Society, 2006; Winterthur Library Research Fellowship, 1996.

WRITINGS:

Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Maryland. Williams-Forson's research background is in cultural studies, material culture, food, and women's studies. She also studies the social and cultural history of the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as power structures and legacies among African American women. Williams-Forson published her first book, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, incorporating many of these research areas into the book. Using plantation records, relevant literature, interviews, photographs, commercial art, and her personal family history, Williams-Forson explains how chicken has come to symbolize the African American woman in terms of her historical connections to it through modern-day stereotypes. However, she also reassigns the chicken as a sign of the African American woman's self-identity and even advancement.

Vanessa Bush, writing in Booklist, summarized that "Williams-Forson offers intriguing interpretations of black history, culture, and feminism." A contributor to Publishers Weekly called the study "hard-going" and the bibliography "staggeringly thorough." In the Women's Review of Books, Francesca Gamber noted that the book is "persuasively argued and vividly written."