La Vinia Delois Jennings

La Vinia Delois Jennings’s course offerings have ranged from undergraduate honors courses to graduate seminars bearing provocative titles such as “Racial Passing and the New Millennium Minstrel Show”; “Consciousness and Memory: The Materialization and Visualization of the Immaterial in Twentieth-Century Literature and Film”; and “Identifiable Qualities: West African Traditional Cosmologies in the Novels of Toni Morrison.”

She has received the Jefferson Prize (1999), an award given by the Chancellor and one of the University’s highest; the Junior Faculty Teaching Award (1995-96), given by the College of Arts and Sciences; and the John C. Hodges Excellence in Teaching Award (1994), presented by the University of Tennessee’s English Department. In 1998, Dr. Jennings was appointed a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Málaga in Spain. She has given papers and organized panels regularly at the meetings of the Modern Language Association, the College Language Association, the African Literature Association, the Toni Morrison Society, and the International Conference on Caribbean Literature.

Selected Publications

• Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Cambridge UP, Fall 2007.
• 
  Alice Childress. New York: Macmillan, 1995.

Edited books

• At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Cinema, (forthcoming).
• A Short Walk by Alice Childress, Afterword by La Vinia Delois Jennings, New York: Feminist P, 2006.

Representative articles

• “The Black Woman’s Life as a Minstrel Show.” Afterword. A Short Walk. Alice Childress. New York: Feminist P, 2006. 335-58.
• “Reflection of Self as Other: Mimetic Parallels Between Minstrelsy and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities.” Staging a Cultural Paradigm. The Political and the Personal in American Drama.” Ed. Barbara Ozieblo and Miriam López-Rodríguez. Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002. 307-22.
• “Segregated Sisterhood: Anger, Racism, and Feminism in Alice Childress’s Florence and Wedding Band.” Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage. Ed. Carol P. Marsh-Lockett. New York: Garland, 1999. 43-53.

Book Reviews

• The First Black Actors on the Great White Way by Susan Curtis. American Literature 71.4 (December 1999): 809-10.
• Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community by Katie Geneva Cannon. African American Review 32.2 (Summer 1998): 17-19.
  

Contact Information

La Vinia Delois Jennings
Associate Professor
Department of English
409 McClung Tower
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430

Office: (865) 974-6959
Fax: (865) 974-6926
E-mail: laviniaj@utk.edu

Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Research

Twentieth-Century American Literature and Women's Literature