As Jacqueline Charles shared recently at the Miami Herald, Carole Boyce-Davies has been honored with the inaugural Eric Eustace Williams Endowed Chair in Caribbean Studies at Howard University. The university announced that the appointment recognizes Trinidadian-born Boyce-Davies’s international scholarship and contributions to Caribbean and African diaspora studies, while honoring the legacy of Eric Eustace Williams. The investiture ceremony at Howard took place yesterday, September 17, 2026. Our most enthusiastic congratulations to Carole on this new honor! See excerpts from the Miami Herald below.
Carole Boyce-Davies is being honored with a prestigious endowed chair at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Jean Gerdes Courtesy of Carole Boyce-Davies, the distinguished Trinidadian-born scholar on Caribbean and African studies with deep ties to South Florida, is being honored with a prestigious endowed chair at Howard University in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s leading historically Black universities. The school announced that Boyce-Davies will become its inaugural Eric Eustace Williams, Ph.D., Endowed Chair in Caribbean Studies. The appointment recognizes her international scholarship and contributions to Caribbean and African diaspora studies, while the newly created endowment honors the legacy of Eric Eustace Williams.
A historian and scholar, Williams taught at Howard before becoming Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister after the country gained independence from Britain on Aug. 31, 1962. Boyce-Davies is currently chair and professor of African Diaspora Literatures in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard. She is also the H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and serves as a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Havana.
Before joining the faculty at Howard in 2023, she taught at Cornell University, Northwestern University and Florida International University. At FIU she served as director of African New World Studies from 1997 to 2006 and co-founded the Eric Williams Lecture Series with Williams’ daughter, Erica Williams Connell. The series ran at FIU for 19 years before moving to the University of Texas in 2021.
“Doing the work without knowing future impact is what we should all see as part of our personal demands as scholars, writers, thinkers,” Boyce-Davies said of the honor and its connection to her years at FIU. “If what we contribute is recognized and is taken forward, we all benefit just as the beneficiaries of streams of prior intellectualism and activism.” The former president of the Caribbean Studies Association who organized its first conference in Haiti in 2016, she also notes that to be the founding Eric Williams Chair in Caribbean Studies not only speaks to Howard’s innovation but of its efforts to ensuring “the Caribbean is seen as a knowledge field.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article317195676.html
Eric Eustace Williams, Ph.D. Endowed Chair in Caribbean Studies Investiture Ceremony
Thursday, September 17, 2026 1pm
The Oliver, Howard University, 2715 Georgia Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001
https://events.howard.edu/event/investiture-ceremony-carole-boyce-davies-phd