P. Gabrielle Foreman is Professor of English and American Studies at Occidental College where she teaches African American and American literature and culture as well as issues of social justice. She is the author of three books and editions including Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. In her Penguin Classic’s reissue of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, Foreman and her co-editor Reginald Pitts “managed to pick up one of the coldest trails in 19th century African American studies,” as one reviewer put it. Instead of dying in poverty shortly after Our Nig was published as many had assumed, Wilson was well known across the East for her hair care products, and, after the Civil War, as “Boston’s eloquent and earnest colored medium.” Foreman has published more than a dozen essays and book chapters in critical anthologies and leading academic journals such as Representations, the Yale Journal of Criticism and American Literary History. She has received academic grants from the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, the Huntington Library, and others. Her teaching has been recognized by her campus and by the American Council for Learned Society through a Graves Award for Teaching and Scholarship. She was also named a Kellogg National Leadership Fellow for her work with youth. With young activists and partners from the non-profit sector she co-founded Action for Social Change and Youth Empowerment. AScHAYE put young activists on boards of directors and provided training and support to help build cohesive groups of youth leaders of color to work across issue areas, race, and the geographical divide of Southern California. She continues to work with L.A. community-based organizations on the issue of sustainable community/academic partnerships. She is at work on a project entitled Disruptive Narratives: Harriet Wilson and the Politics of Place, Race and Religion.

Dr. Foreman has served on the consulting or editorial boards of several academic journals including American Literature. She graduated from Amherst College, Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Ethnic Studies. Dr. Foreman has received Occidental College's most prestigious faculty awards for both her teaching and her scholarship. She has served at Bowdoin College as Visiting Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and will soon join the faculty at the University of Delaware as the Ned B. Allen Professor of English.