Dr. Dolan Hubbard, an honors graduate of East Rowan High School and a member of the Catawba College Board of Trustees, will spend the 2012 spring semester at Harvard University where he will be a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research. Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the director of the Du Bois Institute.
Hubbard will work on a book-length project titled “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Luminous Darkness.” He puts Du Bois’ landmark work, “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903), in conversation with The Declaration of Independence (1776), by Thomas Jefferson; “Heart of Darkness” (1899), by Joseph Conrad; “The Liberal Imagination” (1950), by Lionel Trilling; “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), by Lorraine Hansberry; “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992), by Toni Morrison; and “A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.” (1986). They set up a call and response between oppression and freedom.
He will participate in the spring colloquium series where he will give a lecture titled “Reflecting Black, Du Bois, Hansberry, and A Knock at Midnight” on Feb. 22.
Du Bois was the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He held teaching positions at Wilberforce University and Atlanta University. The father of the modern civil rights movement, he was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where he served as editor of its organ, the Crisis.
Hubbard is professor and chairperson of the department of English and language arts at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Md. He was educated at Catawba College (’71), the University of Denver and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has received fellowships from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
His research interests include 19th- and 20th-century African-American literature, Diaspora studies and Digital Humanities. He is an executive director of the forthcoming documentary, “Black Scholars in America: The Story of the College Language Association.”
He is author or editor of numerous works, including “The Sermon and the African-American Literary Imagination.” He is a member of the editorial board of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes and has served as editor of the Langston Hughes Review.
A Granite Quarry native, Hubbard is the son of the late Olin and Elizabeth K. Hubbard. He is married to the former Ruth Hampton of Kannapolis. They have two children, Aisha and Desmond. They are members of Pennsylvania Avenue AME Zion Church in Baltimore.