Recognition Supports AAMU Scholar's Research on Harlem Renaissance Poet

Dr. Charlotte Teague, associate professor and chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Alabama A&M University, has been awarded the prestigious Sterling A. Brown Fellowship by Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The honor, valued at more than $8,000, includes travel, lodging and a stipend, marking her sixth competitive fellowship for the 2024–2025 academic year.

Williams College hosts the definitive Sterling A. Brown collection. The highly competitive fellowship supports scholars conducting research related to Brown, an acclaimed poet, essayist, anthologist, folklorist and professor whose work helped define the Harlem Renaissance and shaped 20th-century African American literature.

Teague’s winning fellowship research project, “Sterling Brown as Literary Cartographer and Architect: The Mapping and Creating of Stories of the African American South,” explores how Brown’s poetry and criticism charted the cultural and spatial narratives of the Southern Black experience. Her research will inform new course material at AAMU, including a special unit in the University’s Black Poetry course featuring Brown and his contemporaries James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois.

“This fellowship allows me to engage deeply with archival materials that bring Sterling Brown’s intellectual world to life,” Teague said. “It offers a rare opportunity to expand how we teach the Harlem Renaissance – not as a closed chapter in history, but as an ongoing dialogue between literature, identity and place.”

Teague’s research also carries personal and historical resonance. She discovered that Sterling A. Brown was the brother of Mary Edna Brown Coleman, one of the founders of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., of which Teague is a member. Coleman was married to Frank Coleman, one of the founders of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., and together they inspired the enduring “Coleman Love” phenomenon, symbolizing unity and scholarship within the Black Greek-letter community.

“Learning that connection was deeply meaningful,” Teague said. “It reminds me how legacy and scholarship intertwine – and how the pursuit of knowledge often leads us back to community and kinship.”

A two-time alumna of Alabama A&M University, Teague earned her doctorate from Morgan State University, where her dissertation examined spatiality in African American women’s texts, particularly the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. That study of spatial and cultural mapping continues to inform her scholarship today – from her Sterling A. Brown Fellowship project to her recent publication in Salem Press’s newest volume on Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

Teague specializes in language and professional writing, Black women writers and protest literature, and has established herself as a leading scholar of narrative space and identity in African American literature.

This recognition follows another major achievement for Teague: her selection for the Center for Community News’ 2024 Cohort of Faculty Champions, honoring university educators advancing local journalism and academic collaboration through university-led reporting initiatives.

Teague will present her research findings from the Sterling A. Brown Fellowship during the inaugural Chair’s Speaker Series hosted by the Department of English and Modern Languages this fall, offering students and the broader community an opportunity to engage with her scholarship.

“As an educator and researcher, my mission is to bridge the past and present through the written word,” Teague said. “Through Sterling Brown’s lens, we see the endurance of Southern voices and the ongoing power of African American storytelling to shape how we understand ourselves and our world.”