Ayesha Hardison

- Associate Professor of English & Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Director, History of Black Writing
- Co-Editor, Women, Gender, and Families of Color
Contact Info
Personal Links
Biography —
Professor Hardison is currently at work on a literary history of the civil rights movement tentatively titled Specters of Segregation in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. She served as the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the fall of 2014.
Education —
Research —
Twentieth-century and twenty-first-century African American literature; gender and sexuality studies; cultural history and theory
Selected Publications —
Book
Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature, American Literatures Initiative, University of Virginia Press, May 2014.
Selected Articles
“Where Author and Auteur Meet: Genre, the Erotic, and Black Female Subjectivity.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 12.1 (April 2014): 88-120.
“Crossing the Threshold: Zora Neale Hurston, Racial Performance, and Seraph on the Suwanee.” African American Review 46.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2013): 217-235.
Awards & Honors —
Nancy Dasher Award, College English Association of Ohio, Writing through Jane Crow, 2015.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title from American Library Association, Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature, 2014.
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar: Rethinking Black Freedom Studies from the Jim Crow North to the Jim Crow West, directed by Komozi Woodard and Jeanne Theoharis, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, NY, June 15-26, 2015.
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute: Contemporary African American Literature, directed by Lovalerie King, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, July 8-28, 2012.
The National Academies Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, African American Studies Department, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2010-2011.
Black Metropolis Research Consortium Short-Term Fellowship in African American Studies, Chicago, IL, July-August 2009.
The National Academies Ford Foundation Diversity Dissertation Fellowship, 2005-2006.