Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.

Boyce Davies has held distinguished professorships at a number of universities including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies at Northwestern University (2000) and was appointed to the Kwame Nkrumah Professor at the University of Ghana, Legon (2015). She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including the three-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora and over a hundred journal articles and encyclopedia entries. She serves on the International Scientific Committee of UNESCO General History of Africa, Volume Nine, as the coordinator/editor of the epistemological forum on Global Blackness of the forthcoming volume on the African diaspora and is the Vice-Chairperson of the African Humanities Forum (based in Mali). She has lectured on Black women's writings and experience, Black Left Feminism, and African Diaspora issues across North America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, and in Brazil, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, India, and China. She has held visiting professorships at several universities, including Beijing Foreign Studies University, China and has been a Fulbright Professor at the University of Brasília, Brazil and the University of the West Indies at St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.

As Director of African New World Studies at Florida International University, Boyce Davies developed the Florida Africana Studies Consortium and served on the Florida Commissioner of Education's Task Force for Implementing the Florida Mandate for the Teaching of African American Experience. She has been president of major academic organizations such as the African Literature Association and the Caribbean Studies Association.