Fear never allows us to be our best selves and never lets us see how connected we all actually are. Dr. Valerie Babb is a professor of English and the Director of the Institute for African American Studies at UGA. A distinguished scholar of African American literature and culture, Dr. Babb examines how our American ideals are being threatened by narratives of fear.

Valerie Babb is a Franklin Professor of English and director of the Institute for African American Studies. She has been a professor at Georgetown University and a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. Among her publications are Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture, Black Georgetown Remembered, and A History of the African American Novel. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is the recipient of a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship in American Studies. She has lectured extensively in the United States and presented a Distinguished W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin.

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