David Akbar Gilliam
Newly graduated and newlywed, David Akbar Gilliam traveled over land from Boston, MA to Bogotá, Colombia, where he and his wife made their home for one year before returning to the United States.
After graduating from Harvard University in Hispanic Studies, then spending more than ten years in sales and marketing for a leading Chicago retailer and five years in corporate sales of computer hardware and software systems, Gilliam resumed academic studies. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Illinois in Hispanic Studies at Chicago. He spent one year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University before joining the faculty of DePaul University in 2003, first at the Barat campus in Lake Forest, then in the Department of Modern Languages at the Lincoln Park Campus, beginning in 2004.
Growing up African American in the United States, he began his experience in the Spanish language and the culture of Latin America and Spain during his eighth grade year. The more he discovered about Latin America’s tri-ethnic cultural heritage, the greater the personal bond he felt between the Latin American and African American communities. Like many other African Americans and many Latin Americans, he traces his descent to Africa, Native America and Europe. Exploring this tri-ethnic link, and especially the often unknown or unacknowledged role of the African presence throughout Latin America, has been a driving force and inspiration in his research.
At DePaul, Prof. Gilliam teaches courses in Spanish language and in Latin American literature. In addition, he has traveled extensively in Southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and has taught the course “Islam in the United States” and the Practicum in beginning Arabic. Four trips to Puerto Rico helped inspire him to write the article “Mother Africa and la Abuela Puertorriqueña: Francisco Arriví, Rosario Ferré, and the Ambiguity of Race in the Puerto Rican Family Tradition.”