Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women's Research and Resource Center (1981) and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies at Spelman College. For many years she was a visiting professor at Emory University's Institute for Women's Studies where she taught graduate courses in Women's Studies.

She has published a number of texts within African American and Women's Studies which have been noted as seminal works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women's literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, which she coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith. Her most recent publication is an anthology co-edited with Johnnetta B. Cole, Who Should Be First: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign. She is the past president of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.