Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins passes away at age 80
In an email to the campus community, President Garry W. Jenkins has shared the news of the passing of Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins, a member of the Bates faculty since 2003.
Dear Members of the Bates Community,
I write with the sad news that Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins, a brilliant scholar, champion of critical inquiry and academic freedom, and a gifted teacher praised for a “soaring intellect matched only by her kindness,” died on Aug. 18, 2024, at age 80.
Raised in Washington, D.C., Professor Houchins earned a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and doctoral degree from Union Institute and, for 20 years, was a faculty member with the Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies of the Claremont Colleges before leaving the professoriate to enter a Carmelite monastery in Baltimore.
Upon departing religious life, she was a research associate with the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, on whose advisory committee she later served. She was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Bates faculty in 2003, serving for a time as a special assistant to the president for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Professor Houchins was unwavering in both defending and advancing academic freedom and critical inquiry. In 1975, while director of the Black Studies Center at the Claremont Colleges, she was instrumental in the appointment of activist and scholar Angela Davis to her first teaching position after her 1972 acquittal on federal charges, telling reporters that Davis would be a “lecturer with a capital L.” Professor Houchins played a role in protecting Davis from the uninvited media that swarmed the campus on her first day, joining “two burly security guards” in stopping reporters from entering a building. Told that the media was waiting for Davis, she told them to “Enjoy themselves. They’re not going to get Angela.”
Her father, labor economist and attorney Joseph Roosevelt Houchins, was a member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” who led the Division of Negro Affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Professor Houchins had a framed photograph of him with other cabinet members in her office, and in recent years, she and a colleague published two of his papers on Black business development and strategy. Her mother, Frankie V. Lea Houchins, was a physicist and photographer, and at one point a secretary to famous novelist Nella Larsen.
Professor Houchins’ teaching and research proceeded from the intersection formed by the discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. Her courses at Bates, which were cross-listed in the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, included “Black Feminist Activist and Intellectual Traditions,” where she used critical race theory as one mode of intellectual inquiry. Other courses included “Survey of Literature of the Caribbean,” “Literary Representations of the Africana Religions,” and “The Writings of Toni Morrison.”
Her scholarship also concentrated on Black women’s experience of the Divine. With Bates faculty colleague and friend Baltasar Fra-Molinero, she published Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2018), a translation of a hagiography of Sor Teresa Chicaba, an African woman who spent her years after enslavement in a Dominican cloistered monastery, including the scholars’ introduction that explores the dynamics of race, gender, and religion in 18th-century Spain. In 1991, she wrote the introduction for Spiritual Narratives of four 19th-century Black women, Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, and Virginia Broughton.
Professor Houchins’ impact on Bates students was profound, especially for students whose senior theses she advised. This included the honors thesis of Sam Jean-Francois ’23, who praised their mentor for “push[ing] me to think critically since my first day at Bates, thereby expanding my mind to horizons I never imagined.” Another honors student said, “Professor Houchins’ soaring intellect is matched only by her kindness.” In 2022, she received the college’s Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. At a panel discussion to celebrate the award, she said that the vocation of teaching demands that “we instruct students in the practice of pushing back against what is normative, what is safe.”
A certified archivist, Professor Houchins co-directed grants to refurbish, organize, and preserve the Bessie Head–Khama Family Archives in Serowe, Botswana, as well as aided in the organizing and cataloging of the Baltimore Carmelite Monastery archival documents from Vatican II to the present.
She was an evaluator for Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowships for the last decade, and was co-chair of the Program in Africana at Bates since 2022. Most recently, she received a Bates Phillips Fellowship for 2024–25 to pursue original research in literature, science, and history during her year-long sabbatical. Last year she presented her scholarship at the College Language Association convention. Joining a panel on “Literary Representations of LGBTQ+ Sexualities in the Black Diaspora,” chaired by another Bates faculty colleague and friend, Charles Nero, she presented “Representations of Non-Binary Sexualities in the Diaspora.” At the time of her death, she was writing a draft of a scholarly study on the subject, which has been optioned by Edinburgh University Press.
Information about opportunities to honor Sue’s life will be forthcoming.
These two recent Bates News stories share elements of Professor Houchins’ life:
- 2018: Look What We Found: A photograph of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet”
- 2018: “She saw herself as the bride of Christ”: The story of an African nun in 18th-century Spain
I know that the entire community will mourn Sue, and also feel enormous gratitude for her decades of contributions to our intellectual community.
