Black, Catholic, and Leading

Kim Vaz-Deville is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers Black cultural life and public memory in New Orleans. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the UNCF/Mellon Programs, and the Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS program. In 2024, she was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes academiques by the French Republic. She lives and works in New Orleans.

"Kim Vaz-Deville has written with subtlety and complexity about Norman Francis's life and his work in fostering the dreams of generations of Xavier students and citizens of New Orleans and Louisiana. She captures the labor of a generation who quietly made real the new and extraordinary possibilities so many had lived and died for before them. Black, Catholic, and Leading is a biography for our times."-Leslie M. Harris, author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 "In Black, Catholic, and Leading, Kim Vaz-Deville examines the life and leadership of Norman C. Francis, the longtime president of Xavier University of Louisiana, whose steady guidance helped shape one of the nation's most important institutions for educating Black professionals. Situating Francis within the social and political transformations of the modern South, she explores how faith, community, and determined leadership expanded opportunity for generations of students."-Marybeth Gasman, author of Why Historically Black Colleges and Universities Matter: 25 Years of Historical Research for Justice "Vaz-Deville masterfully illuminates how President Francis gave Xavier University what few campuses have-a sustainable institutional voice."-John Silvanus Wilson Jr., author of Hope and Healing: Black Colleges and the Future of American Democracy