Bernard W. Bell collection

Dr. Bernard William Bell (b. 1936 - ) is an emeritus research professor at The Pennsylvania State University and an internationally known scholar of American and African American literature, language, and culture. Throughout his forty-year career in academia, Dr. Bell’s contributions to African American scholarship included serving as a co-founder and acting head of one of the nation’s first African American Studies programs, authoring and editing nine books and more than seventy articles and reviews, and teaching and lecturing in eight countries. Dr. Bell also served as a mentor to Dr. Carlton E. Brown, a former president of Clark Atlanta University (2008 – 2015). Dr. Bell was born in Washington D.C. yet spent most of his childhood years growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, and the South Bronx of New York City. Despite being born into the Great Depression to an unwed mother, Dr. Bell had aspirations to attain higher education from the time he was young and was affectionately known as “School Boy” within his neighborhood. His path toward higher education began after serving in the Marine Corps for four years. Upon the completion of his service in the Marines, Dr. Bell enrolled in Howard University under the GI Bill where he studied under Professor Sterling A. Brown. To support his wife and young family, he worked full time as an airline chef and a taxicab driver while taking a full load of courses.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1962, Dr. Bell worked as a high school English teacher in the Washington D.C. public school system while pursuing a master’s degree in English at Howard University until 1967. He then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and earned his PhD English with Honors in 1970.

In 1969, Dr. Bell co-founded the interdisciplinary W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, and in 1970, he became the acting head of the department and the first chairman of the Five College Afro-American Studies Executive Committee. He served as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts from 1975 until 1987, during which he received a Senior Fulbright Award and other travel grants to teach in Coimbra, Portugal; Freiburg, West Germany; and various institutions around the U.S. While at the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Bell authored and edited widely-acclaimed books including Modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (1972), The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (1974), and The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987), which was a recipient of the 1989 CLA Book Prize.

In 1991, Dr. Bell became a Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University and taught there until he officially retired on June 30, 2012. During his thriving career at Penn State, he received multiple Fulbright and travel awards to Spain and China and published a host of award-winning books, articles, and monographs. Two of his most famous works include The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2005), which received four awards, and Bearing Witness to African American Literature: Validating, and Valorizing Its Authority, Authenticity, and Agency (2012).

Dr. Bell has been married to Mrs. Carrie Bell since 1958. They have three sons—Byron, Douglass, and Christopher—and six grandchildren. Dr. Bell currently resides in Pennsylvania.