Professor Craven, professor of comparative literature and English as well as affiliated faculty of film studies received her BA at St. John's College in philosophy and mathematics, studied philosophy at Catholic University before moving into a PhD program at New York University where she received her diploma in 1992. Her graduate work in seventeenth century Baroque tragedy led her eventually into other fields, notably, the links between Baroque tragedy and cinema. She has since applied these links to a study of film and literature on racial issues and the Black American Expatriates. She has equally written about an area of Paris, La Goutte d'Or, and its resonance with socio-political issues linked to the Franco-Algerian war as well as to the American civil rights controversies. Craven has published on Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht, Shakespeare, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Abd Al Malik and Chester Himes. She has produced short videos and radio productions in tandem with her research interests. She is author of Visible and Invisible Whiteness: American White Supremacy Through the Cinematic Lens (2018), co-editor of Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century; Richard Wright and the Post-Racial Imaginary and Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination. Her most recent publication is “Expatriation in Richard Wright’s Late Fiction” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019).