Divine Defiance: Merging Faith with Activism to Address Today’s Urgent Social Issues
Drawing from her book, Prophesying Daughters, about 19th-century black women preachers, Dr. Chanta Haywood will discuss how a concept she calls “divine defiance” can be applied to critique, challenge, and address today’s most urgent social issues. Defined as using a relationship with a higher power to fuel social justice, divine defiance offers this generation of thought leaders a clear pathway to merge faith with activism.
Biography
Dr. Chanta M. Haywood is the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Coppin State University. With nearly 25 years of executive experience across the Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland university systems, she has served as Graduate Dean, Associate Provost, Associate Vice President for Research, and Vice President for Advancement. She holds a Ph.D. from UC San Diego and a certificate in Fostering Diversity and Inclusion from Yale University.
Throughout her career, Dr. Haywood has championed interdisciplinarity as a foundational requirement for modern higher education. While she maintains a deep respect for the rigor of traditional academic disciplines, she believes that faculty research and student learning reach their highest potential when we intentionally blur the boundaries between them. In her view, the most complex societal problems require multidisciplinary solutions. To institutionalize this, she has launched innovative programs at every university she has served, most recently the Cross-Disciplinary Solutions Lab at Coppin State, where students tackle real-world challenges through integrated perspectives.
A prolific scholar and writer, her book, Prophesying Daughters: Black Women Preachers and the Word, 1823-1913, is itself a multidisciplinary bridge between literature, history, and theology. Her academic leadership and pedagogy have been recognized with the Outstanding Faculty Leader Award and the Outstanding University Teaching Award (received twice) at Florida State University. Her global perspective was further shaped during her tenure at FSU, where she directed the Communications Program in London and taught persuasive writing.
Dr. Haywood’s national influence includes a four-year term as Chair of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Board under the Obama Administration. As a Principal Investigator, she has secured millions in funding from NASA, NIH, DOE, IMLS, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Additionally, as an entrepreneur, she founded CollegeSmartNow, a program that has coached hundreds of students to achieve high standardized test scores and collegiate success.