WELCOME | DeLisa D. Hawkes

DELISA D. HAWKES, PH.D.

ABOUT ME

I am an assistant professor of Africana Studies and an affiliate faculty of Department of English and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Interdisciplinary methodologies inform my research and teaching interests in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century African American literature, African American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, historical fiction, speculative fiction, racial passing, colorism, neo-slave narratives, and the Afro-gothic.

WHAT I TEACH

I teach courses in African American literature, African American Studies, 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 representations of Black Indigeneity in nineteenth to early-twentieth-century African American literature. I analyze novels, essays, and memoirs from this period with attention to Black Indigeneity's impact on narratives of racialization, kinship, gender, and citizenship in the United States.

My work appears in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including J19, MELUS, Langston Hughes Review, Studies in the Fantastic, North Carolina Literary Review, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée, and 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past.