Valerie Babb is Franklin Professor of English and Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She has been a professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC and a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont. Among her publications are Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (1998), Black Georgetown Remembered (1991), a book and a video described as 'the history behind the Oprah Book Club selection River, Cross My Heart (1999),' and Ernest Gaines (1991). She edited The Langston Hughes Review from 2000-2010. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York and is the recipient of a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship in American Studies. She has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad, and has presented a Distinguished W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
