Richard Yarborough received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980 and is currently Associate Professor of English and Faculty Research Associate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. He has lectured and published on race and American literature, with essays on authors such as Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Attaway, and Richard Wright. In addition, his work focuses on the construction of blackness in U. S. popular culture, particularly cinema. He is the associate general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature as well as the director of the University Press of New England's Library of Black Literature reprint series. He has served as a consultant on a number of film and theatre projects; most notably, he was a dramaturg for Anna Deavere Smith's play House Arrest in 1998. He has received UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award, commendations from the City of Los Angeles and the County of Los Angeles, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has served as Director of UCLA's Bunche Center for African American Studies and been a member of the California Council for the Humanities.