Karla F.C. Holloway

Karla Francesca Holloway (née Clapp; September 29, 1949) is an American academic. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in the Duke University School of Law as well as the university's Department of English, Department of African & African American Studies, and Program in Women's Studies.

Holloway's early life was spent in Buffalo, New York, the middle daughter of prominent educators Claude D. and Ouida H. Clapp. She received an A.B. From Talladega College. Part of her undergraduate credits were earned at Wroxton College (Wroxton Abbey), where she studied British literature, politics and economics, and part were earned at Harvard University where she studied Linguistics.

Holloway received an M.A. from Michigan State University, an M.L.S. from Duke University School of Law, and a Ph.D in American Literature and Linguistics from Michigan State University. Her dissertation, about the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, was titled "A Critical Investigation of Literary and Linguistic Structures in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston".

Holloway has been a member of the Duke faculty since 1994. Previously she taught at North Carolina State. She was hired, she later recalled, because Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "had just left for Harvard and Duke suddenly needed someone to teach a night course that had already been scheduled for Gates."

She has served on the boards of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, and Princeton University's Council on the Study of Women and Gender. She has been affiliated with Duke University's Institute on Care at the End of Life, and with the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. She was the first African American woman to serve as a department chair (African & African-American Studies). While chair, she led the program to full departmental status with the authority to hire and tenure its own faculty.

Her teaching and research focusses on African American cultural studies, gender, biocultural studies, law, and ethics. Professor Holloway's books primarily analyze race, gender, literature, and especially the writings of African-American women. Referring to twentieth-century African-American women authors, Holloway wrote the following, which has been favorably quoted by others in her field:

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