Carolinas Communication Association

Rhondda Robinson Thomas is an associate professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches early African American Literature and American literature. Dr. Thomas has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1770-1903, co-edited the anthology titled The South Carolina Root of African American Thought, A Reader, and edited the scholarly edition of Jane Edna Hunter’s autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer. She contributed the essay “Locating Slave Narratives” to the Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative and has published essays in African American Review and the Southern Quarterly. She is also is the acquisitions co-editor for the African American series being launched for the new Clemson University Press and Liverpool University Press partnership.

 

Dr. Thomas is currently conducting research for two publications by Cambridge University Press about literature produced by and about writers of African descent in the 18th-century colonial and early American eras—an essay on 18th-century auto/biography and editor of volume 1, 1750-1800, of the African American Literature in Transition series. She has also begun research for a biography of 19th-century African American activist and author Maria W. Stewart.

 

In the fall of 2015, she was awarded a $100,000 grant for the research project Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History, which will include a website, podcast series, traveling exhibit, books, and campus heritage tour. A year later, she mentored a team of 14 undergraduate researchers who helped to document the Clemson University Story. She also led a successful initiative for the installation of three new historical markers for Clemson that document the history of Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who once lived and labored on Clemson land and served as co-chair of the Race and the University: A Campus Conversation initiative. She recently accepted an invitation to join a taskforce that is creating an interpretative plan for the telling of Clemson University’s complete history. She was a faculty-in-residence in the Calhoun Courts community from 2014-2017.

 

She has been invited to give talks on her research for the Democracy Then and Now series at the University of Maryland, The Bible, Empire and Reception History Conference in Atlanta, the College of Charleston, Furman University in Greenville, SC, and the University of Illinois-Springfield. She has been selected as a fellow for National Endowment for the Humanities Institute summer seminars twice and more recently as a writing fellow for the “Hearing the Inarticulate: Ethics and Epistemology in the Archives” Seminar and Writing Retreat at the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

Dr. Thomas was the recipient of Clemson University’s 2013 Martin Luther King, Jr. Service Award primarily for her work with the Jane Edna Hunter Project and Clemson’s 2015 James E. Bostic Diversity and Inclusive Excellence Award.