Prof. Simone Drake '97 honored at Ohio State

Simone Poindexter Drake ‘97, chair of the Department of African American and African Studies, is the 2020 Recipient of the Larry M. Lewellen Award for Distinguished Service. The award is given annually to a student, faculty or staff member who has rendered exceptional service to graduate students.

Drake is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University, where she serves as Department Chair and Director of the AAAS Community Extension Center. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on how people of African descent in the Americas negotiate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation through the lenses of critical race, gender, and legal studies.

She is the author of When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making (University of Chicago Press 2016) and Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Louisiana State University Press 2014, Southern Literary Studies Series); co-editor (with Dwan Henderson) of Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press 2020); and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She serves on the editorial board of Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men (Indiana University Press). Also, she is a HERS Institute Alumna, and she completed an American Council on Education leadership forum and the eighteen-month long Ohio State University President’s and Provost’s Leadership Institute.

BA, Classical Civilization and English, Denison U. (1997)
Ph.D., English, U. of Maryland, (2007)
M.S.L., Master in the Study of Law, Ohio State U. (2013)