T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of French, Professor and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, and Director of the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies at Vanderbilt University. A leading scholar in Black European Studies and comparative Black Diaspora literatures and cultures and theories of race and feminism, she is the author of Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women (NYU Press), Negritude Women (U of Minnesota Press), Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Duke UP), and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Rowman & Littlefield), and she has edited or co-edited five books, including The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" (Bloomsbury).