Dre Vaden, a former UA transfer student, is program manager for student engagement transfer initiatives with the Capstone Center for Student Success, where she leads efforts for Bama Transfers and helps students transition to life at UA.
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Aparna Bhooshanan and Addison Miller have been selected for the Critical Language Scholarship Program 2024 to study Chinese and will join a diverse group of American students dedicated to mastering critical languages this summer.
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Dr. Heather Ashley Hayes, assistant professor of Communication Studies, participated in South by Southwest EDU and will receive the John I. Sisco Excellence in Teaching Award from the Southern States Communication Association on April 6.
Read moreGoal 3 of UA's Strategic Plan is dedicated to enriching UA's learning and work environment by providing an accepting, inclusive community that attracts and supports a diverse faculty, staff and student body. Read the UA Strategic Plan.
Associate Professor of English
College of Arts and Sciences
For Associate Professor Delia Steverson, 2023 was an eventful year, marked by her hiring at—and homecoming to—The University of Alabama, where she specializes in 20th an 21st Century African American Literature, Critical Disability Studies, and Southern Studies. Additionally, October 15 brought the release of "Stumbling Blocks", Steverson’s edited collection of Delores Phillips’s unpublished works.
As she was finishing her PhD at UA, focusing on representations of disability in African American literature, she heeded the suggestion of a colleague and read "The Darkest Child" by Delores Phillips.
“I was so moved,” Steverson says. “The book was so powerful that I tried to look up more information on who this woman was, but I couldn’t find anything except a weak Wikipedia page and an obituary.” But through that obituary, Steverson discovered Phillips had a surviving daughter, and soon she was in touch with the author’s family. In 2018, she flew to Cleveland, Ohio, to meet with Phillips’s sister, daughter, and grand-daughter, and discovered a treasure trove of Phillips’s unfinished work: poems, stories, and two novels, "No Ordinary Rain," and "Stumbling Blocks." Working with Phillips’s family, Steverson edited the manuscripts and brought what would have been relegated to invisible history into the light of day.
This is the work that Steverson is focusing on as a new member of the UA community, but she is certainly no stranger to Tuscaloosa, having grown up here. After departing to pursue her BA at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, she returned here for both her MA and her PhD. Her professional journeys have taken her to the Dominican Republic, and then to the University of Florida.
