Patrick “9th Wonder” Douthit and Brenda Marie Osbey to join African American Studies faculty

9th Wonder

Grammy award-winning producer and Winston-Salem native Patrick “9th Wonder” Douthit and famed poet Brenda Marie Osbey will join the Wake Forest University African American Studies faculty in July. Douthit will be Professor of the Practice in Residence in African American Studies for Fall 2022, and Brenda Marie Osbey will be Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Residence in African American Studies for Spring 2023. They will each teach undergraduate courses in African American Studies and participate in public programs during the semester.

“We are so fortunate to be able to welcome these two extraordinary visiting scholars to Wake Forest. Each will help our students and entire community conceptualize the multiple relationships of the arts to teaching and research in African American Studies in powerful new ways,” said Dean of the College Michele Gillespie. “Even more, both Douthit and Osbey exemplify the too-little acknowledged centrality of artists in shaping history, society and culture.” 

Brenda Marie Osbey

As an academic discipline, African American Studies is distinguished by the creative collaborations between artists, writers, and scholars. We are excited to have these two tremendous talents join our intellectual community.

Douthit is excited to return to Wake Forest. “I’ve been connected to Wake Forest since 1989 by way of Ernest Wade, former Director of Minority Affairs at the University. I was selected as a 14-year-old for ‘Project Ensure,’ a college prep program for academically gifted minorities from Winston-Salem going to the 9th grade. I spent every summer there until I graduated from high school in 1993. Wake Forest was my very first taste of what college life could and would be. I am excited about this opportunity, and how everything has come full circle.” 

At Wake Forest, he will teach an undergraduate seminar, “Where It All Began: A History of Hip Hop,” which will feature two sessions open to both the Wake Forest and Winston-Salem communities. 

Osbey comes to Wake Forest from Brown University. “In 2017, I attended student presentation sessions of the WSSU-WFU Universities and Communities course that Professor Corey Walker and Provost Rogan Kersh were then teaching. Their ‘communiversity’ approach had a special appeal. It echoed an earlier sense of higher learning having a mission extending beyond the advancement of the individual, a commitment to service to the immediate and larger communities. I’m very much looking forward to working with students in the Program in African American Studies.”

Osbey will teach the undergraduate seminar “Modernist Africana Poetry of the Americas” which examines the origins of modernism among Africana authors of the Americas and poetry, poetics and poetry movements of Brazil and Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States from the late 19th through the first half of the 20th century.

“To be able to welcome 9th Wonder back home to an institution that was so formative for him and to welcome my dear friend Brenda Marie back to Winston-Salem is a gift. I know our students and the entire Wake Forest community will be transformed by their presence as members of our faculty,” said Walker.

Read more on the Wake Forest University news website.