Sue E. Houchins

Associate Professor of African American Studies

Houchins is one of six Bates faculty members who have received tenure appointments or promotions that will take effect Aug. 1, 2012.  (Read the story.)

She is a scholar of African American studies and women and gender studies.  The topics of her interdisciplinary research are at the intersection of African Disaporic and gender studies, with an emphasis on religions and literature.

At Bates she has instructed courses on Black feminist theory, African and Caribbean literatures, Chaucer, literary theory, and women’s spiritual narratives and mystical texts.

Houchins and her Bates colleague Baltasar Fra-Molinero recently completed a critical edition and translation of the 18th-century hagiography Compendium of the Exemplary Life of the Venerable Mother, Sister Teresa Juliana of Santo Domingo, which is under contract with Vanderbilt University Press. Houchins also recently published her essay “Anowa, Paradoxical Queenmother of the Diaspora,” in Essays in Honor of Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, edited by Ann Adams (2011-2012).  Another forthcoming essay, “‘Translation of Oneself into the Otherness of Languages’ Where Madness and Mysticism Meet: A Reading of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power,” will be published in Annals of Scholarship this year.