Uncrowned Community Builders

Dr. Karla FC Holloway is the Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Duke University where she holds the William R. Kenan Professorship of English and African American Studies. Professor Holloway is a graduate of the Buffalo Public Schools, Talladega College and Michigan State University-where she earned her PhD in English and Linguistics. Her professional career began as a teacher of eighth grade Language Arts at Clinton Jr. High School in Buffalo. She is the daughter of Claude D. and Ouida H. Clapp and the sister of Dr. Leslie Clapp Ezie. Professor Holloway is the author of five books, including Passed On: African American Mourning Stories; Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics and the Color of Our Character; and Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature. She has published numerous professional articles and reviews; provided guest commentary on National Public Radio and to magazines including Emerge, The Crisis, and Black Issues in Higher Education, and delivered lectures and keynote addresses across the United States as well as internationally-including England, France, Germany, and Turkey.

With past professorships at North Carolina State University, Western Michigan University and Old Dominion University, Dean Holloway is the first woman of color to hold a distinguished professorship at Duke University. As a member of its faculty, she has chaired the university's committee on Appointments, Promotions and Tenure that grants promotion and tenure to faculty of five of the university's schools, including Arts and Sciences, the School of Medicine, the Pratt School of Engineering, Divinity and the Fuqua School of Business. She was the co-founder, in 1999, of the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Study at Duke, named to honor her friend and esteemed colleague, Dr. John Hope Franklin. In its inaugural years she assumed the role of co-director of the Center's Humanities Institute creating and overseeing its annual interdisciplinary seminar on race with foci on politics, religion, identity and globalization. Following the publication of Passed On, and as a core faculty member of the Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life, Dr. Holloway has led national seminars and institutes on issues of end of life care, hospice and medical ethics involving African Americans. She is the featured speaker at the Institute's national seminar: "Crossing Over Jordan."

Her national board memberships have included The College Board's Advisory Council; the Greenwall Foundation's Advisory Board in Bioethics; Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life; the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Princeton University Advisory Council for the Program in the Study of Women and Gender. She is a member of the International Association of University Professors of English and the Kenan Ethics Advisory Council at Duke. Professor Holloway has been the recipient of three Outstanding Book Awards from Choice Magazine, and has received the Anna Julia Cooper Scholar Award from St. Augustine's College; the Samuel DuBois Cook Pioneer Award from Duke University; the Outstanding Research Award and the Provost's Professional Development Award from North Carolina State and has been a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. She is a member of The Links, Inc., and was received into the sisterhood of Chi Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.--the same Talladega College undergraduate chapter as her mother Ouida.

In 1972, at Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church in Buffalo, she married Russell Holloway-who holds an undergraduate degree from Talladega College and a graduate degree from Duke University where he is Associate Dean for Corporate and Industry Relations for Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. The Holloways are members of Davie Street Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, NC and are the parents of two children, their beloved son Bem K., deceased; and their wise and wonderful daughter Ayana who is a graduate of Princeton University and a graduate student in physics at Harvard University.