She received her PhD in English in 2004 from UC Berkeley and, from 2004 to 2005, was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the English department at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on African-American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially poetry. Her first book, Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry, is forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press in 2013. As a Beinecke Fellow, she will pursue research on a second book project about the idea of Ethiopia in African-American literature. beineckepoetryOctober 1, 2012African American Studies at Beinecke LibraryVisiting Fellows View the discussion thread. Curatorial Areas