Rate My Professor Tom Spencer

Tom Spencer-Walters is Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies at California State University, Northridge, where he joined as full-time faculty in 1984, served as department chair, and was recognized for completing 35 years of service in 2019. He earned a B.A. Honors in English and Linguistics from the University of Sierra Leone in 1973, an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington in 1977, an M.A. in Communications from the University of Washington in 1980, and a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Washington in 1986. His academic career includes serving as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa during 1999-2000 and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Zimbabwe. Spencer-Walters coordinated the Interdisciplinary Studies in Africa program and founded and served as General Editor of Kapu-Sens: The Pan African Studies Department Literary Review.

Spencer-Walters' research interests encompass African and Diaspora Literatures, Orality and Literacy, Memory and Liberation Discourse, Poetry, and Semantics. He has authored and edited several key publications, including Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diaspora Literatures (Bedford Publishers, Troy, MI, 1998), Shared Visions: A Multicultural Reader and Rhetoric (McGraw-Hill, 1996), and co-authored Sierra Leone Krio: Language, Culture, and Traditions (Bloomsbury, 2021). Other notable works include 'Issues in African and African American Literate Communications' (with Daphne Ntiri, Journal of African Studies, Spring 2000), 'Language as Subversion and Cultural Affirmation in Caribbean Literature' (Association of University English Teachers of South Africa, University of Free State, South Africa, 2001), and 'Family Patterns in Sierra Leone' in Families in a Global Perspective (Charles B. Hennon, ed.). He taught writing, African, and Caribbean literatures, contributing to culturally informed pedagogy in Africana Studies through department leadership, event coordination, and scholarly output that bridges oral traditions and literary analysis across African diaspora contexts.