Background
Long, Richard Alexander was born on February 9, 1927 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Thaddeus B. and Leila (Washington) Long.
founder lecturer author cultural historian
Long, Richard Alexander was born on February 9, 1927 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Thaddeus B. and Leila (Washington) Long.
AB, Temple University, 1947. Master of Arts, Temple University, 1948. Doctor, University Poitiers, France, 1965.
As an academic, he taught at University of Pennsylvania, University of Paris, University of Poitiers, Atlanta University, Emory University, Morgan State College and West Virginia State College, and had worked as a visiting lecturer at universities in Africa and India. in 1948. He did doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Paris, and received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Poitiers in France in 1965. Having begun his teaching career as a graduate assistant at Temple University, he subsequently taught at West Virginia State College.
He also spent a decade and a half as a teacher at Morgan State College (now University).
He taught English and French at the Hampton Institute and was also director of its College Museum. At Hampton in 1968 he founded the Triennial Symposium on African Art, now an annual conference at Atlanta University’s Center for African and African American Studies.
From 1971 to 1973 he was visiting lecturer at Harvard University. In 1973 he went as adjunct professor to Emory University, where in 1987 he joined the faculty as Atticus Haygood Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.
In addition, Long served on the editorial boards of several publications, including the Langston Hughes Bulletin, Phylon and the Zora Neale Hurston Bulletin.
Long served as a consultant and as a committee member of many cultural organizations and institutions, including the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Society of Dance History Scholars, and the Zora Neale Hurston Festival.