Nghana Lewis, J.D. and Ph.d, is Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow and Associate Professor of English and African & African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University. She is a scholar in the work of Afro-American authors. Her research interests also include black literary and popular cultural studies, K12 educational policy studies, and HIV/AIDS. Her courses include Hip Hop, HIV/AIDS, and African & African Diaspora Studies, Black Women’s Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS, and From Sojourner to Sister Souljah: Social Movement and Black Feminist Thought in America. She is a native of Lafayette, LA, where she graduated from St. Thomas More High School. She earned a BA in English from Tulane University; a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and a JD in Civil Law from Loyola University. In addition to the Weiss chair, she holds: the Louise and Leonard Riggio Endowed Professorship in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship.
She also holds a jointly appointed associate professorship in English and African & African Diaspora Studies at Tulane Dr. Lewis serves as the Interim Director of Tulane’s Program for Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship; teaches educational policy in the Department of Psychology; and holds an affiliate appointment with Tulane’s School of Law. Her research and teaching engage questions of power in four main areas: American literary & cultural studies, gender relations, HIV/AIDS, and K12 educational policy. She has authored a book and numerous journal articles on southern literature and southern culture.
One of two current book projects that Dr. Lewis is completing,Before & After Katrina: Black Education in New Orleans, examines frameworks that have historically given rise to inequities in K-12 educational opportunities and attainment for black children and how those frameworks operate in current political debates about school reform and student achievement in New Orleans. Her monograph sheds light on the important, yet under-examined, nexus among Southern and Louisiana social and cultural mores, educational opportunity, criminal justice, and racial oppression.