Wake Forest University's English Department offers a variety of courses and programs of study using literature to research and think about cultural and philosophical matters. The department offers a major, minors in English, writing, medieval studies, journalism, and creative writing. A masters program is also offered. The department sponsors a diverse range of speakers and events each semester.

Dolly Aimee McPherson was born on December 2, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Reverend Dr. James Gordon McPherson, an evangelistic preacher, and Dolly Taylor McPherson. She had four siblings, three brothers named James Gordon, Jr., Stephen, and Wyatt, and an elder sister, Jeanette. McPherson graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a master's in English from Boston University in Massachusetts, and a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Iowa (1986). Her doctoral thesis, "Order Out of Chaos: the Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou," was published as a monograph in 1990.

McPherson traveled extensively as part of her career. She won a Fulbright to teach American literature and language at the University of Amsterdam and later worked as a program administrator for Africa and Asia at the Institute of International Education, from roughly 1962-1973. According to a WFU biography, McPherson also taught at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, in the 1950s, as a lecturer at a University of Maryland program in Frankfurt, Germany, at Virginia State College (now University) in Petersburg, Virginia, and finally at the City University of New York in about 1973.

In 1974, McPherson became the first African-American woman to join the WFU faculty full-time; she was joined by the first African-American man to join the WFU faculty full-time, biology professor Herman Eure. With Eure, McPherson was also a supporter of the WFU Office of Minority Affairs, which opened in 1978. McPherson's research agenda included African American literature and American biography, and over her twenty-seven-year career as an English professor at WFU, she taught courses on British literature, African American fiction, and autobiography. She also acted as the literary executor of her longtime friend and WFU colleague Maya Angelou's papers held at Z. Smith Reynolds Library. Angelou joined McPherson at Wake in 1982 and wrote about a 1971 trip that the women took to campus for . In 2001, McPherson retired from Wake Forest. She died on January 19, 2011, in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Sources:

Angelou, Maya. "Why I Moved Back to the South." . 1982 February. Harvey, Jeff. "McPherson's place in university history secure." . 2002 February 7. Access at https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/36800 King, Kerry. "Service set for professor emerita Dolly McPherson." . 2011 February 15. Access at https://inside.wfu.edu/2011/02/service-set-for-professor-emerita-dolly-mcpherson/ O'Donnell, Lisa. "Dolly McPherson, pioneering faculty member at Wake Forest, dies." . 2011 January 21. Access at https://journalnow.com/news/article_3bf5f3d7-817c-5bdd-a28f-5d44c34a78b8.html Salinas, Andrew. "James Gordon McPherson collection, 2477." Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. Access at https://amistad-finding-aids.tulane.edu/repositories/2/resources/148