Dr. Shireen K. Lewis

Dr. Shireen Lewis is the Founder of SisterMentors and the Executive Director of EduSeed®. She has devoted over 20 years to coaching and mentoring women and girls. In April 2005, Dr. Lewis was honored as a Distinguished Alumnae for her outstanding contribution to the education and mentoring of women and girls of color. In honoring Dr. Lewis, the Dean of Douglass College and the Douglass Associate Alumnae identified her as a role model for future generations of women. In December 2005, she received The Honorable Annice M. Wagner Pioneer Award from the Bar Association of the District of Columbia for her work with SisterMentors. In 1989, she received an award from the National Association of Women Lawyers for her work on behalf of women law students.

Dr. Lewis has mentored women in college, encouraging them to pursue graduate and professional school. She was Dean and teacher of a high school for girls in Trinidad and Tobago. She helps raise funds for the first school in a village in Tibet which promotes education among girls. She has served on the board of several community organizations that promote education and equity for women and girls. She is past Co-President of the Washington, D.C. branch of the American Association of University Women.

Dr. Lewis is a columnist and writer for the Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education Magazine. Her scholarship and teaching are in Francophone West African and Caribbean literature and theory. Her newly released book entitled, Race, Culture and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory From Négritude to Créolité (Lexington Books, 2006), is the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Négritude, Antillanité and Créolité. Her book interrogates black identity as theorized by black Francophone intellectuals like Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Patrick Chamoiseau. Her most recent article, "Gendering Négritude: Paulette Nardal and the Birth of Modern Black Francophone Literature" (Romance Languages Annual, 1999), positions black Francophone women as intellectual contributors to the birth of the Négritude movement.

Dr. Lewis has taught at several universities, including as Visiting Professor at The University of Virginia. She has presented her scholarship both in the United States and abroad and has been interviewed by Radio Haïti, located in Port-au-Prince, about her work on Paulette Nardal. She is a member of the Modern Language Association.

Dr. Lewis received her Ph.D. in French Literature in 1998 from Duke University and her J.D. from The University of Virginia School of Law in 1989. She obtained her B.A. in 1986 in French and Spanish from Douglass College, a women's college at Rutgers University, where she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in her Junior year.

She is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and the State of New York and is a member of the American, District of Columbia and New York Bar Associations.

Dr. Lewis is fluent in French and Spanish and has reading ability in Continental Portuguese. She was born and raised in Pepper Village, Fyzabad, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies; has lived in Senegal, West Africa; and Paris and Tours, France. She has traveled to Tibet and China and countries in West Africa, Western Europe, and the Caribbean.

Dr. Lewis has been featured on television including MHz Networks and DCTV and in various magazines including Ms. magazine and DIVAS, published in Paris, France.

• Read an interview with Dr. Lewis HERE

EVENTS HERE

INTERVIEW HERE

REVIEWS

"Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory From Négritude to Créolité crosses a crucial bridge from Africa to the Caribbean. The reader travels from postcolonial Afrocentrism to a cross-cultural global perspective. Lewis was the first to illuminate the important position of Paulette Nardal, a Martinican feminist active in the Negritude movement. This dramatic discovery, which reveals black women's full contribution to Francophone culture, exposes a new world in French literature."—Linda Orr, Duke University

"Not everyone who's talking about the space of contemporary black conciousness knows how it evolved. Shireen K. Lewis does. Her analysis of how Black Francophone Caribbean intellectuals and writers made the twentieth-century transition from advocating negritude to trumpeting creolite illuminates our current debates about cultural 'authenticity' and multicultural hybridity."—George Elliott Clarke, University of Toronto

"An eloquently written and path-breaking analysis of black identities in the Francophone world with significant relevance for contemporary discussions of globalism and the Black diaspora."—Katya Gibel Azoulay, Grinnell College

Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité

In this groundbreaking book, Shireen Lewis gives a comprehensive analysis of the literary and theoretical discourse on race, culture, and identity by Francophone and Caribbean writers beginning in the early part of the twentieth century and continuing into the dawn of the new millennium. Examining the works of Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, and Paulette Nardal, Lewis traces a move away from the preoccupation with African origins and racial and cultural purity, toward concerns of hybridity and fragmentation in the New World or Diasporic space. In addition to exploring how this shift parallels the larger debate around modernism and postmodernism, Lewis makes a significant contribution by arguing for the inclusion of Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, and other women into the canon as significant contributors to the birth of modern black Francophone literature.