Andrea A. Davis

Dr. Andrea A. Davis is Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto. Over the more than 20 years of her academic  career, she has worked to advance equity, access and justice in post-secondary education, helping to diversify university curricula through the development of new courses and programs and supporting the success of racialized and first-generation students. 

From 2015 to 2020, she was chair of the Department of Humanities at York, where she developed the Black Canadian Studies Certificate, one of only two Black Studies programs in Canadian universities at the time. As the first Special Advisor on Anti-Black Racism Strategies in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, she organized webinars and teach-ins that each attracted hundreds of participants, adjudicated funding for anti-Black-racism strategies, and helped to develop new programs to support students and emerging and early career researchers. Most recently as Academic Convenor of the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences — a gathering of over 10,000 delegates — she led a transformative vision of humanities, social science and arts-based research grounded in Indigenous and Black Thought and extensive community collaboration. 

Dr. Davis is a leading scholar in Black Studies in Canada, and her widely published interdisciplinary research is rooted in an anti-racism feminist theoretical framework that analyzes questions of race and gender through a focus on the literary and cultural productions of Black women, the location of Caribbean diasporic communities in Canada, and the constructions of Black youth masculinities. In her most recent book, Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, she explores possibilities for collaboration among Indigenous, Black and other racialized women and offers new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada. She has been invited to present her research in Ghana, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Spain, Austria, Germany, Australia and across the Caribbean and United States. As a public intellectual and sought-after speaker, she has also made numerous presentations to schools, and government, business and community organizations. 

An accomplished teacher and fierce advocate for students, she has won teaching awards at the faculty, university and national levels, including a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship. She has also been recognized with many community awards, including an outstanding research profile in the Council of Ontario Universities’ 2012-2013 Research Matters Campaign, a 2017 Renaissance Award from Afroglobal Television, a 2018 selection as one of 100 Accomplished Black Canadian Women, and a nomination for a YWCA Toronto Women of Distinction Award. She is currently co-editing (with Leslie Sanders) The Handbook to Black Canadian Literature and is co-editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies.