Claudia Tate, professor of English and African-American studies at the University, died of lung cancer on July 29. She was 55.
Tate taught at the University for three years, taking a leave of absence in between the second and third years.
Tate was best known for her work in the field of African-American literary criticism and psychoanalysis.
Her significant contributions to the field were recognized in December when the African-American studies program held a one-day symposium devoted to her work, titled "Black Intellectuals and the Academy: The Work of Claudia Tate."
The conference consisted of two panel discussions, in which five professors from other universities participated.
"She was an extraordinarily important figure in the history of pushing African-American [literary] criticism to a new and more sophisticated stage," Hazel Carby, an African-American studies professor at Yale University, said in a statement. Carby was a panelist at the symposium.
Her courses included AAS 201: Introduction to the Study of African-American Cultural Practices, AAS 325/ENG 325: African-American Autobiography, ENG 362: American Literature: Civil War to World War I and ENG 389: Women Writers of the African Diaspora.
A native of Long Branch, Tate attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as an undergraduate. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University.
She served as an assistant professor at Howard University for six years before receiving tenure. She left Howard in 1989 for George Washington University where she taught until her appointment as a tenured professor at Princeton in the summer of 1997.
Tate is the author of three books — "Black Women Writers at Work" (1983), "Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century" (1991) and "Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race" (1998) — and more than 50 scholarly articles, book chapters and reviews.
Tate is survived by her sons, Read Hubbard of New York City and Jerome Lindsay of Norfolk, Va. and her parents, Harold and Mary Austin Tate of Fair Haven.
A memorial service will be held Sept. 27 at the University Chapel at 2 p.m.
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