William L. Andrews

William Leake Andrews (born September 27, 1946) is an American Professor Emeritus of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a scholar of early African-American literature. With books such as To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, Andrews helped establish the academic study of African-American literature in the late twentieth century. In 2017, Andrews received the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature from the Modern Language Association. and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968.

Academic career At Texas Tech University, William L. Andrews was an assistant professor of English from 1973 to 1977. and To Tell a Free Story (University of Illinois Press, 1986). The latter argued that African-American writers developed strategies, using a range of public writings, to reach skeptical readers and publishers. His critical editions with introductions reintroduced famous narratives by Black American women writers to the public in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press, 1986). Andrews also became known as a specialist in the work and life of Frederick Douglass. Andrews was a founding editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

The University of Kansas offered Andrews the position of Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Professor of American Literature with tenure in 1989. He was also the Director of the Hall Center from 1993 until 1996. These editions, released in print and later digitized, facilitated the use of African-American authors in college courses, high school classrooms, and libraries.

In 1997, Andrews accepted the E. Maynard Adams Professorship of English & Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which he held until his retirement in 2019. With Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, Andrews edited the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (first edition, 1997). which became part of "Documenting the American South", an award-winning digital humanities resource of texts, images, and recordings from the collections of the University Libraries at UNC. In 2007, his undergraduate alma mater Davidson College awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree. The “Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative,” a project Andrews helped develop as a co-principal investigator, received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2012 to further digital teaching, research, and collaboration.

Andrews supervised dissertations and mentored colleagues during his career. While at UNC-CH, Andrews helped secure grants to fund graduate fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Among his students are academics Andreá N. Williams, Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, and Joycelyn Moody, who holds the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Moody wrote about Andrews’s years of service to the profession “initiating the least experienced students into the world of the academy."

Andrews served on the Davidson College Commission on Race and Slavery between 2018 and 2020.

In 2019, he published a monograph, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840-1865 with Oxford University Press. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., described Slavery and Class as a "seminal work of scholarship, one destined to generate a new branch of literary studies, dedicated to studying how class mattered within the African American tradition."

UNC academic-athletic scandal While he was Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities at UNC-CH, Andrews was selected to co-commission a 2012 report that identified systemic flaws in standards for courses during the University of North Carolina academic-athletic scandal. The resulting report investigated the content and delivery of courses offered by the Department of African and Afro-American Studies between 2007 and 2011 summer sessions.

Books The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) Literary Romanticism in America (editor, 1981) Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois (editor, 1985) Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (editor, 1986) To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986) My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass (editor, 1987) Six Women’s Slave Narratives (editor, 1988) The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson (editor, 1990) Three Classic African-American Novels (editor, 1990) Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives (co-editor, 1990) Bursting Bonds, by William Pickens (editor, 1991) African-American Literature (co-editor, 1991) Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (editor, 1991) Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt (editor, 1992) The African-American Novel in the Age of Reaction: Three Classics (editor, 1992) Classic American Autobiographies (editor, 1992) African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays (editor, 1993) From Fugitive Slave to Free Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown (editor, 1993) Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance (editor, 1994) Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington (editor, 1995) The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (editor, 1996) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor, 1997) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (co-editor, 1997) The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (co-editor, 1997) The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (editor, 1997) Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives, 1772–1815 (co-editor, 1998) The Civitas Anthology of American Slave Narratives (co-editor, 1999) Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook (co-editor, 1999) Slave Narrative (co-editor, 2000) Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line, by Charles W. Chesnutt (editor, 2000) The Concise Companion to African American Literature (co-editor, 2001) Classic African American Women's Narratives (editor, 2002) Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger): A Casebook (co-editor, 2003) North Carolina Slave Narratives (co-editor, 2003) James Weldon Johnson: Writings (editor, 2004) Behind the Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley (editor, 2005) The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature (editor, 2006) The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride by Julia C. Collins (co-editor, 2006) Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (co-editor, 2008) The Portable Charles Chesnutt (editor, 2008) Slave Narratives after Slavery (editor, 2011) The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave (editor, 2011) Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 (2020)

Awards and honors Norman Foerster Prize from American Literature, 1976 National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, 1980–81 American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, 1984–85 Choice Outstanding Academic Book for To Tell a Free Story, 1986 William Riley Parker Prize for outstanding article of the year in PMLA, 1990 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, 1994-95 American Library Association Outstanding Reference Source for The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 1997 Booklist Editor’s Choice for The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 1997 Outstanding Library Program for Documenting the American South from Southeastern Library Network, 2000 Choice Outstanding Academic Book for The Curse of Caste, 2007 Honorary Doctor of Letters conferred by Davidson College, 2007 Bill Little Award for Distinguished Service to the College of Arts and Sciences, UNC, 2012 James W.C. Pennington Award, University of Heidelberg, 2015 Thomas Jefferson Award, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2015 Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature, Modern Language Association, 2017

Personal life Andrews has advocated for the human rights of incarcerated people and those who have been in jail with the Religious Coalition for a Non-Violent Durham. A pianist and singer, he has set the poetry of Emily Dickinson to music and performed some of his compositions at the 2013 Emily Dickinson International Society International Conference.

Andrews married Charron Andrews (née Fenbert) in the summer of 1984. Together, they have two children and one grandchild. By tracing his genealogy, Andrews learned that his Virginian ancestor John Ferneyhough, Jr., joined a local organization in 1835 that opposed abolitionists. In the preface to Slavery and Class, Andrews reflects on being a scholar of African-American narrative whose forebears profited from slavery.