Elizabeth Hadley, 57, author, professor of Africana studies

While looking for a dissertation topic, Elizabeth Hadley found that little attention had been paid to the first African-American woman to pilot airplanes. To right the slight, she spent more than a decade preparing the dissertation and then turning it into a book, "Bessie Coleman, The Brownskin Lady Bird."

"I wanted to get it into the history books for our own children," Dr. Hadley told the Globe in 1994, after the book had been published.

Her intellectual flight through aviation history took Dr. Hadley into one of the many fields where her imagination alighted during a career as a college teacher, theater director, and writer on topics such as film, poetry, feminism, and female entertainers in popular culture. She died Sunday at her Somerville home, eight years after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Dr. Hadley was 57 and an associate professor of Africana studies at Simmons College.

For several years Dr. Hadley and Christina Brinkley alternated in chairing the Africana studies program at Simmons, said Susan Scrimshaw, the college's president. "They really transformed that department. They were able to create a center of energy, focus, and commitment."

Dr. Hadley was "one of the key forces that shaped Africana studies at Simmons and also at other colleges around The Fenway," Scrimshaw said. "One of the phrases people used was that she was a unique voice and a powerful presence."

Known for her incisive views, Dr. Hadley cast a critical eye on the way blacks, African-American women in particular, were portrayed in venues such as television and film. She was scornful of music videos that perpetuated stereotypes reaching back to Sapphire in "The Amos 'n Andy Show" and beyond.

"They are a derivation of all the images we've had before, whether it's Mammy, Sapphire, or Pam Grier, who played in all those blaxploitation films," she told the Globe in 1993.

And last year, after the new head of programming at Black Entertainment Television announced the network's fall lineup, Dr. Hadley expressed her disappointment at what she saw as an unnecessarily narrow vision of African-Americans.

"I'm not saying BET has to be PBS," she told the Globe in April 2006, "but there is more to black people than rap music."

Cultural criticism was but one of many roads Dr. Hadley traveled in order to teach, said her daughter, Malika Hadley Freydberg of Atlanta.

"My mom's deal was definitely education," she said.

Born in New York City, Dr. Hadley grew up in a foster home in Harlem in the 1950s and '60s and entered the foster care system at such a young age that she remembered little about her birth family, her daughter said.

She graduated from the University of Rochester in New York and received a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh, along the way marrying and having a daughter. Dr. Hadley's marriage ended in divorce at about the time she began pursuing her doctorate at Indiana University.

"It took awhile to get that degree because my mom never did anything the easy way," her daughter said.

Writing about a little-known pioneering aviator meant that Dr. Hadley all but took up residence at a microfiche machine in the Indiana University library, though the long hours of research were broken up by road trips to interview those who had known Bessie Coleman, Freydberg said.

At home, Dr. Hadley set aside time to ensure that her daughter had good role models, even among her playthings.

"She made my dolls until about age 7, at least," her daughter said. "When I was born, she could not find dolls of color that were soft, so she learned how to make dolls. My first doll was a black Raggedy Ann, and my favorite part was that she sewed on a heart that said, 'I love you.' If you looked under the doll's dress, there was the heart sewed onto her chest."

Along with directing plays, Dr. Hadley studied opera, though she did not perform publicly. "She would still sing around the house, and she had some nice pipes," said her daughter, who is a high school choir director in Atlanta.

Among her mother's favorites were the spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and the hymn "Precious Lord, Take My Hand."

Dr. Hadley took her daughter to Africa in the mid-1980s to spend a year teaching at Kenyatta University in Nairobi on a Fulbright fellowship. Before leaving Indiana, one of the last stops mother and daughter made was at a shelter for battered women, where they donated belongings and clothing they could not bring to Kenya.

Upon departing Kenya, they found places to donate books Dr. Hadley had accumulated. Books were Dr. Hadley's favorite gift and were frequently bestowed on children wherever she lived, her daughter said.

They returned to the United States and lived in Brookline while Dr. Hadley taught for several years at Northeastern University, taking time away for a fellowship at the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Studies at the University of Rochester.

Through her career, Dr. Hadley also taught at Boston College, Boston University, Dennison University, Indiana University, Lasell College, and Wheelock College. Along with African-American studies, the courses she taught included subjects such as theater, cinema, and women's studies.

"When she was here, she taught a very popular course on images of African-American women in films," Scrimshaw said. "She was beloved at Simmons."

A memorial service will be held at 6 p.m. today in A.J. Spears Funeral Home in Cambridge.