badia ahadProvost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs | Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and African American Studies

Dr. Badia Ahad received a B.A. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996, and a doctorate in 2004 in English Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She held a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Black Studies (formerly African American Studies) at Northwestern University from 2004-2005, before holding a tenure track appointment at Loyola University Chicago in English from 2005-2023. At Loyola she rose through the ranks being tenured and eventually promoted to the rank of full professor before joining Emory University in 2023. At Emory she served as the Dean of Oxford College, before being promoted to Emory’s Provost in 2025. Dr. Ahad’s scholarship anticipates much of this current moment, as it attends to the Black psyche through signature literary works, as well as popular culture such as music, comedy/performance, and foodways. Her two groundbreaking monographs are: Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2021); and Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Additionally, she has a co-edited volume with Oiyan Poon, Difficult Subjects: Strategies for Teaching Race, Sexuality, and Gender (Stylus Press 2018), and several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters as well as a co-edited journal—a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly (2022).

Dr. Ahad is jointly appointed in the Department of African American Studies and English.