Cheryl A. Wall, an author and longtime Rutgers University professor who helped elevate Zora Neale Hurston and other black women into English literature curriculums, died on April 4 at her home in Highland Park, N.J. She was 71.

The cause was complications of an asthma attack, her daughter, Camara Epps, said.

In a teaching career of nearly five decades, Dr. Wall championed racial diversity both in the curriculum and the classroom. She encouraged more black students to major in English and pursue postgraduate degrees. And she widened the scope of literary scholarship to include black novelists, poets and nonfiction authors as well as essayists, whom she considered central to the black literary tradition.

“From its earliest iteration, the African American essay endorsed the democratic ideals the nation professed, while condemning its failure to fulfill them,” Dr. Wall wrote in “On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay” (2018).

She contrasted W.E.B. Du Bois’s self-conscious vision of blackness with Hurston’s bravado — “that when she is discriminated against, she feels ‘merely’ astonished that anyone can deny themselves ‘the pleasure of my company.’”