Tiffany Willoughby-Herard named Professor Extraordinarius

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard named Professor Extraordinarius

  Office of the Dean November 1, 2021

UCI scholar joins UNISA's College of Human Sciences

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, associate professor of African American Studies at UCI, has been appointed a three-year term as Professor Extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa (UNISA).

The appointment is analogous to an American distinguished professor. It signifies an exemplary faculty member affiliated with UNISA and functions as a remote professorship. Willoughby-Herard’s contributions include her extensive experience working on comparative racialization in the South African and North American contexts, Black political thought and African feminisms. At UCI, she holds faculty affiliations in the Culture and Theory Ph.D. Program and the Departments of Political Science and Comparative Literature.

Her book Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (University of California Press, 2015) focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation’s study of race in South Africa and its influence on the creation of apartheid. About it, one reviewer said, “Gender scholars, race scholars, and historians of South Africa stand to gain much from carefully reading this bold and impressive work.”

Willoughby-Herard will have the opportunity to collaborate with a broad range of scholars at UNISA, which specializes in distance learning and bridges faculty from all over the world. “I hope that researchers will find a crossroads in each other’s work, especially when their approaches are different. For me the stakes of meeting each other at the crossroads is cosmological and sacred,” said Willoughby-Herard. “What is at stake is the bodies (planet, languages, water, air, soil, cultures, societies, histories, philosophies, forms of violence, losses) we inhabit together.”