Karla F.C. Holloway

Karla F.C. Holloway is an American scholar of ethics, law, literature, gender, and culture. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in Duke Law School and the Department of African & African American Studies.

Early life, education, and family

Holloway received an A.B. From Talladega College. Part of her undergraduate credits were earned at Wroxton College (Wroxton Abbey), where she studied British literature, politics and economics and at Harvard University where she studied Linguistics. She received an M.A. from Michigan State University, an M.L.S. from Duke University School of Law, and a Ph.D. in American Literature and Linguistics from Michigan State University, writing her dissertation on "A Critical Investigation of Literary and Linguistic Structures in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. Her early life was spent in Buffalo, New York as the middle daughter of prominent educators Claude D. and Ouida H. Clapp. Her husband, Russell Holloway, is an Associate Dean for Corporate and Industry Relations at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke and her daughter, Ayana Holloway Arce, is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Duke University.

Professional activities

Holloway has been a member of the Duke faculty since 1994. Previously she taught at North Carolina State. She was hired, she later recalled, because Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “had just left for Harvard and Duke suddenly needed someone to teach a night course that had already been scheduled for Gates.”

Her research and teaching interests focus on African American literary and cultural studies, biocultural studies, gender, ethics and law. She has served on the boards of the Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, and the Princeton University Council on the Study of Women and Gender and has been an affiliated faculty with the Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. She was the first African American woman to serve as a department chair (African &African-American Studies). While chair, she led the program to full departmental status with the authority to hire and tenure its own faculty--one of the few Black Studies programs in the country to have that authority. In 1999 she became the first African American woman to serve as a dean of faculty at Duke. She was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences until 2004, when she took a leave to attend Duke Law School, earning the degree of Master of Legal Studies (2005). She is a current member of its faculty. Professor Holloway has been Chair (and member) of Duke's Appointments, Promotion and Tenure Committee, an elected member of the Academic Council and its Executive Council. She is founding co-director of the John Hope Franklin Center and the Franklin Humanities Institute. Professor Holloway is a member of the Hastings Center, an elected association of leading researchers influential in Bioethics and she serves on the Faculty Scholars in Bioethics Board of the Greenwall Foundation. She has held a Ford Foundation Bellagio Residency and was a Sheila Biddle Ford Fellow at Harvard University's Hutchins (then "DuBois") Institute.

Books and other writings

Holloway is the author of eight books, including New Dimensions of Spirituality: A BiRacial and BiCultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. Westport (1987; with S. Demetrakopoulos), The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (1987), Moorings & Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature (1992), Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character (1995), Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002), BookMarks: Reading in Black and White—A Memoir (2006), Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (2011), and the forthcoming Legal Fictions: Constituting Law, Composing Literature.

Passed On is “a portrait of death and dying in twentieth-century African America.” Publishers Weekly hailed it as “an elegantly written survey for general readers and cultural historians alike,” and Virginia Quarterly Review called it “a stunning portrait of African American death in the20th century.” Holloway is credited with the evolution of the word vilomah as the name for a parent who has lost a child.

BookMarks, written during her Bellagio Residency Fellowship in Italy, “explores the public side of reading, and specifically how books and booklists form a public image of African Americans.” The Raleigh News and Observer called it “[e]rudite and emotional in turns” and said that “[i]ts primary strength is its poignancy.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune described it as “a moving and revelatory memoir” and “a work of fiercely intelligent scholarship.”

Private Bodies, Public Texts “centers around an ideas that challenge mainstream notions of professionalism and privacy in the fields of law, medicine, and political discourse.” Robert A. Burt, a Yale law professor, calls the book “an illuminating meditation on the social construction of personal identity, with special focus on gender and racial categorizations in biomedical ethics.” And Ruth R. Faden of Johns Hopkins praises Holloway for “challeng[ing] us to think both more broadly and more specifically about what privacy and justice mean. And she reminds us, with sometimes piercing insight, just how critical gender and race can be in making meaning out of both.”

In 2013 Holloway was appointed to the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Transforming Care at the End of Life. She has published articles in Callaloo, College English, Religion & Literature, Literature & Medicine, Annals of Scholarship, the American Journal of Bioethics and elsewhere.

Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy describes Holloway's "Legal Fictions" as a "wonderful book [that] brings to bear a knowledge derived from a deep immersion in legal studies." Columbia Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin notes that "Legal Fictions represents 'a' culmination (if not 'the' culmination) of Karla FC Holloway's rich corpus of criticism and theory. ...This book is Holloway at her best...."

She has given lectures around the world on race, law, literature, and ethics.

Group of 88

Holloway played a central role in the Duke lacrosse-team rape case of 2006-7, in which three white members of the men's lacrosse team at Duke were charged with raping a black woman at a party. Holloway conceived and was a signatory of the “Group of 88” statement, an advertisement placed in the Duke student newspaper, The Chronicle ad "What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like" "highlighted concerns brought to light by the lacrosse incident about racism and sexism on campus." The idea for the ad grew out of a March 29, 2006, AAAS forum at which students “were invited to voice their frustration with the current situation and, it became apparent, with the university as a whole.” The advertisement was widely criticized as inflammatory and as a prejudgment.

As it became clearer that the rape charges were false, Duke president Richard Brodhead, who had barred the indicted players from campus, invited them back, in response to which Holloway “promptly resigned her role as sup-group chair of the Campus Culture Initiative Committee,” explaining that she “could no longer work in good faith with this breach of common trust" citing her disappointment in the university's failure to allow the judicial process to play out.

“Especially just before a critical judicial decision on the case,” Holloway wrote, this “is a clear use of corporate power, and a breach, I think, of ethical citizenship.” KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr., in their book on the lacrosse case, observed that Holloway “had not recognized any need to defer to judicial decisions the previous summer, when she had written that 'the seriousness of the matter cannot be finally or fully adjudicated in the courts' because 'justice inevitably has an attendant social construction.'” Johnson and Taylor also describe an e-mail sent by Holloway to “dozens of colleagues”: “The previous March, she wrote, while in John Burness’s office, she had overheard Burness taking a call from a Duke police official, to whom a Durham police official had passed along a tale of a never-identified witness supposedly reporting that lacrosse players used ugly racial epithets at the start of the stripper party, before the performance. No such witness statement has been produced. Yet the Wilmington Journal, a member of Black Press USA, printed this. Holloway was never disciplined or criticized by the Duke administration.”

Holloway contributed an article, “Coda: Bodies of Evidence,” to Scholar and Feminist Journal Online, in which she wrote that “At Duke University this past spring, the bodies left to the trauma of a campus brought to its knees by members of Duke University's lacrosse team were African-American and women....The lacrosse team's notion of who was in service of whom and the presumption of privilege that their elite sports' performance had earned seemed their entitlement as well to behaving badly and without concern for consequence.” When challenged by the mother of one of the lacrosse-team members for being “so cruel and callous” in “judg[ing] a whole class of individuals without any facts” and who wrote that perhaps Holloway "was so selfish that you cannot stand the thought of our sons leading successful lives...to justify your own short comings....because it's easier than looking yourself in the mirror." Holloway replied by saying: “Your letter reflects nothing so much as an impoverished spirit and intellect.”

In an interview that appeared in the Durham Herald-Sun on June 29, 2006, by which point the rape allegations were quickly unraveling, Holloway showed no remorse for her attacks on the defendants; rather, she described herself as a “victim.” On October 27, Holloway told the Duke Chronicle that she would sign the Group of 88’ s ad again “in a heartbeat.”