WELCOME | DeLisa D. Hawkes

DELISA D. HAWKES, PH.D.

ABOUT ME

I am an Assistant Professor of English and affiliate faculty of the American Studies Program at William & Mary.

Interdisciplinary methodologies inform my research and teaching interests in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century African American literature, Native American and Indigenous Studies, historical fiction, speculative fiction, genealogy in literature, and cultural identity in horror and science fiction.

WHAT I TEACH

I teach courses in African American literature, Native American and Indigenous literature, film, and archival research.

Community-engaged scholarship is very important to me. I am always seeking opportunities to collaborate and share the work that I do on campus with surrounding communities. In 2018, I completed a non-credit certificate in Engaged and Public Humanities at Georgetown University, and in 2021, I was a fellow with the Community Engagement Academy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

WHAT I RESEARCH

My current book project examines literary representations of Indigeneity and Black and Native relationality during the New Negro Renaissance.

My work appears in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including including J19, MELUS, Women’s Studies, Langston Hughes Review, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Studies in the Fantastic, North Carolina Literary Review, 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past (Palgrave, 2020), Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée (Fordham UP, 2023), and Down the Road and Back Again: Critical Approaches to The Golden Girls (Routledge, 2025).