Tarshia Stanley

Tarshia Stanley is the dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences at St. Catherine University. She is focused on developing programs and courses that engage the liberal arts learning process and embrace social justice across the university. Stanley developed and launched the Integrated Learning Series program for St. Kate’s to link curriculum and programming across the university in ways that enhance experiential learning in the community. Through this program, participants—including students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members—engage with a selected theme through events, discussions and presentations, in and outside the classroom, and at community workshops.

Stanley was the founder and facilitator of the Mothering Our Daughters conference at Spelman College, which for 15 years invited girls ages 7–17 and their mothers/mentors to the campus to share in the journey to healthier self-esteem. Stanley has authored articles critiquing Black women in African, African American, and Caribbean cinema, as well as Black female iconography in American popular culture. She edited The Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Literature for Greenwood Press and the volume for the Modern Language Association’s teaching series entitled Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler. Her areas of focus are film and media studies and African American speculative fiction. She continues to write fiction in her spare time and is working on a sequel to her 2013 novel.

Prior to joining St. Kate’s, Stanley spent nearly two decades at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she served as director of the E.W. Githii Honors Program, and before that as the chair of the Department of English.

Stanley earned her bachelor’s degree in English at Duke University. She attended the University of Florida for her graduate studies, where she earned both her master's and doctorate degrees in English.