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Her third book, “Soul Sounds”: The Afterlife in African American Literature and Music, is forthcoming fall 2026 from Fordham University Press. She is also at work on a born-digital project on Afrofuturism. Her second book, Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature, was published in March 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press. () Her first book, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, was published in 2004 (). Before she joined Macalester’s faculty in 2003, she taught African American Literature at Bowie State University, one of the oldest historically black colleges in the nation. She has also held visiting appointments at Brown University and Brandeis University.

Areas of Study

• African American literature and culture
• Afrofuturism
• The Harlem Renaissance
• Sound Studies
• Digital Humanities
• Literature and legal studies
• Race and visual culture
• Apocalyptic Literature

Fall 2025 Courses

• ENGL 112-01 Introduction to African American Literature
• ENGL 275-01 African American Literature to 1900
• ENGL 401-01 Projects in Literary Studies

Spring 2026 Courses

ENGL 276-01: African American Literature 1900 to Present
ENGL 380-01/AMST 380-01: Topics in African American Literature: Afrofuturism

Selected Publications

“Soul Sounds”: The Afterlife in African American Literature and Music. New York: Fordham University Press. Forthcoming Fall 2026.

“Afrofuturism.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. Ed. Eugene O’Brien. New York: Oxford University Press (2017). . Update, October 24, 2024.

Review essay on The Great Woman Singer by Licia Fiol-Matta, Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues by Will Kaufman, Beyond the Crossroads by Adam Gussow, and Conjuring Freedom by Johari Jabir. American Literature 93.4 (December 2021): 718-22.

“The Consolation of Critique.” Review of How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation, by Aida Levy-Hussen. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 52.1 (May 2019): 145-49. 

“Science.” In Erica R. Edwards, Roderick Ferguson, and Jeffrey Ogbar, eds. Keywords for African American Studies. New York: New York University Press (November 2018).

“Race, Writing, and Time.” In Thomas Allen, ed. Literature and Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (March 2018).

Review of Inside a Silver Box, by Walter Mosley. In Public Books, . 1 September, 2015. 

English, Daylanne K. and Alvin Kim. “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-  Afrofuturism.” American Studies 52.4 (2013): 217-30.

Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, March 2013).

Being Black There: Racial Subjectivity and Temporality in Walter Mosley’s Detective Novels. NOVEL 42.3 (Fall 2009): 361-365.

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

“W. E. B. Du Bois’s Family Crisis.” American Literature. (June 2000).

“Selecting the Harlem Renaissance.” Critical Inquiry. (Summer 1999).

Selected Awards and Honors

• Mellon Renewed Purpose Course Development Grant. April 2018. For Charlottesville: Texts and Contexts, Fall 2018.
• Wallace Travel Grant, �պ���Ʒ. Fall 2015. For travel to and paper presentation at the International James Baldwin Conference in Paris, France. May 2016.
• Mellon Digital Humanities Grant, Summer 2013
• Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2004 by the American Library Association (for Unnatural Selections)
• MLA’s Foerster Prize, 2000

Links

BA: Oberlin College

MA and PhD: University of Virginia