Hazel Carby

Carby's 2019 book Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso) won the British Academy's 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

Carby is considered a pioneer in black feminism and is also known as one of the world's leading scholars on race, gender, and African-American issues. One of her most influential contributions to African Diaspora studies came with her first book, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987). Reconstructing Womanhood offers one of the earliest and most comprehensive studies on black female writers including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Anna Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, among others. Carby followed this book with Race Men: The Body and Soul of Race, Nation, and Manhood (1998), a six-essay collection of critiques on historical sites of black masculinity. Her first chapter, "Souls Of Black Men", is a critique of the gender bias in W. E. B. Du Bois' seminal work Souls of Black Folk (1903). Carby argues that Double Consciousness is an erasure of Black female subjectivity. She does not question the importance of this text in black scholarship; she recognizes that because of the crucial status of Du Bois and Souls it is important that she undertakes this critique. After Race Men, she penned Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (1999). Currently she is working on her forthcoming book, Child of Empire. Carby has lectured at numerous colleges and universities worldwide including the University of Notre Dame, Stanford University, the University of Paris, and the University of Toronto.

Carby married fellow Yale professor Michael Denning on 29 May 1982.

In 1981, Carby was appointed as a lecturer in the English Department at Yale University (1981–82), after which she taught English at Wesleyan University (1982–89), and rejoined Yale University in 1989. She is now Yale's Charles C & Dorathea S Dilley Professor of African American Studies & American Studies. Her teaching focuses on race, gender and sexuality in Caribbean and diasporic culture and literature; in transnational and postcolonial literature and theory; in representations of the black female body; and in genres of science fiction. Identified as Marxist feminist, her work primarily deals with detecting and probing discrepancies between the symbolic constructions of the black experience and the actual lives of African Americans.

Hazel Vivian Carby (born 15 January 1948 in Okehampton, Devon) is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C & Dorathea S Dilley Professor of African American Studies & American Studies at Yale University.

Hazel Carby was born of Jamaican and Welsh parents in Okehampton, Devon, UK, on 15 January 1948. She earned a BA degree in English and history from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970, then a PGCE in 1972, at the Institute of Education, London University. She taught high school from 1972 to 1979, then went back to university, at Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, where she gained a M.A (1979) and a Ph.D (1984).