Lois Brown

Mount Holyoke College

Lois Brown joined the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College in 1998. Currently, she is the Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College, a center dedicated to creating invigorating public programs, supporting the leadership potential of students, and creating events that allow dynamic and productive consideration of vital contemporary issues and significant historical questions. A recipient in 2004 of one of the college's two Distinguished Teaching Awards awarded that year, she also was a Baccalaureate speaker in 2004 and delivered the faculty address at the 2002 Convocation. Brown's research and teaching focuses on nineteenth-century African American and American literature and culture, abolitionist narratives, and evangelical juvenilia. A 2000 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Award recipient, she has been affiliated with the Harvard University Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research where she also has been a visiting fellow. Brown has lectured widely and published articles on African American literature, women's writing, early American education, and African American history and religion. In 2001, the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston recognized her work with one of its first African American History Awards and lauded her for her "extraordinary commitment to American history" and her "obvious commitment to education and equality." Brown's biography, *Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution*, published by the University of North Carolina Press in June 2008, has been hailed as the definitive Hopkins biography for decades to come. Photo courtesy of Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo.