Elizabeth West
Professor and Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters Africana Studies, English- Education
Ph.D., Certificate in Women’s Studies, Emory
- Specializations
African American Literature
Literatures of the African Diaspora
American Literature
Gender and Sexuality
Biography
Digital Humanities
- Biography
Elizabeth J. West is Professor of English and the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. Having served previously as Executive Director of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and Treasurer of the College Language Association, West is presently Director of Academics for Georgia State University’s Center for Studies on Africa and Its Diaspora (CSAD). She is also a member of The University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Asylum Hill Research Consortium and the Advisory Board of The Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies (Johannes Gutenberg University).
West is PI for “Intersectionality in the American South,” a Mellon Foundation Grant (2022-25) supporting the establishment of cross-institutional collectives to advance research, teaching, and public engagement in Intersectionality Studies; and she is director of the CSAD-American Family Insurance initiative focusing on Financial Literacy in the public sector (2021-23). She is a former AAUW Fellow, DAAD (Johannes Gütenberg University) Fellow, and scholar in residence at Dartmouth College in the Department of AAAS.
West’s scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to studies of early African Diaspora Literatures of the Americas with particular emphasis on spirituality and gender in these works and their connections to the present. Winner of the 2023 College Language Association Book Award, her recent book, Finding Francis: One Family’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom (USC Press 2022) melds biography and historiography in its exploration of slaving and forced migration on Black family and kinship formations in the U.S. South. She is the author of African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being (Lexington 2011), a work distinct in its employment of a diachronic lens to examine specific African spiritual sensibilities traceable from early to modern Black women’s writings. Her essays and shorter works can be found in critical anthologies and journals such as MELUS, JTAS, Amerikastudien, CLAJ, PALARA, Religions, boundary 2, Womanist, Black Magnolias, South Atlantic Review, and South Central Review. Among her edited projects are the coedited anthology, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (Lexington 2013), the co-edited section, “Religion and Spirituality,” in the Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric (2018), and the co-edited Roman & Littlefield/Lexington book series, Black Diasporic Worlds: Origins and Evolutions from New World Slaving.
- Publications
Scholarship (Selected Works)
Publications—Monograph
Finding Francis: One Family’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. (Dec. 2022). (Winner of the 2023 College Language Association Book Award) https://uscpress.com/Finding-Francis
African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Paperback edition, 2012. Among titles in "CHOICE e-Collection for African-American Studies," https://www.publishersrow.com/Choice_African_American_Studies.htm.
Publications—Editorship Works
Contributing Co-Ed. “Religion and Spirituality” in Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Longue Dureé of Black Voices (2018). Gen. Eds. Vershawn Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson. 91 – 162.
Co-Ed. “Sankofa; or ‘Go Back and Fetch It’: Merging Genealogy and Africana Studies.” (Special Issue). 2(4), 46 Genealogy (Fall 2018). doi:10.3390/genealogy2040046. https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy/special_issues/Africana_Studies
Co-Ed. Five Decades of CLAJ on Race in Anglocentric Literary Works (Special Issue). CLAJ 57.3 (2014).
Co-Ed. & Introduction. Literary Expressions of African Spirituality. (Lexington Books 2013). Paperback edition, 2015
Book Series Co-Editor: Black Diasporic Worlds: Origins and Evolutions from New World Slaving. Roman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, ongoing from spring 2014.
Publications—Journal Articles
“Afterword: In and Beyond the Boundaries of Medievalism.” The “Medieval” Undone: Imagining a New Global Past. Special Issue, boundary2: an international journal of literature and culture. 50.2. Ed. Sierra Lomuto. Forthcoming 2023.
“Community and Naming: Lived Narratives of Early African American Women’s Spirituality.” Religions 11(8), 426 (August 2020). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11080426
“COVID-19 and Black Grief in the Academy.” CLA Journal (Rapid Response Special Issue). Eds. Dana Williams and Kendra Parker. 63.2 (September 2020): 148 - 151.
Co-Author. “Transnational Black Politics and Resistance from Enslavement to Obama Through the Prism of 1619” in JTAS Special Forum Introduction. 10.1 (2019). https://escholarship.org/uc/acgcc_jtas/10/1
“Whiteness in African American Antebellum Literature: An Enduring Imprint in the Lived and Literary Imagination.” South Atlantic Review 84.1 (Spring 2019): 35 - 53.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dnd6xc2yh4t9jd9/SAR_84.1.pdf?dl=0
"American Studies and the Racial Fault Line," Forum: Sebastian Weier's "Consider Afro-Pessimism." Amerikastudien 59.3 (2014): 439 - 442.
“From David Walker to President Obama: Tropes of the Founding Fathers in African American Discourses of Democracy, or the Legacy of Ishmael.” 56 (2012) American Studies Journal (Center for American Studies, Harle-Wittenberg, Germany). http://www.asjournal.org/56-2012.
Publications—Book Chapters
“Citizenship and Enslavement,” The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English. Ed. Matthew Stratton. (5/2023)
"The Transcontinental African in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood." Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies. Eds. Alfred Hornung and Nina Morgan. (2019).
Contributing Co-Author. “Introduction: Religion and Spirituality” in Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Longue Dureé of Black Voices (2018). Gen. Eds. Vershawn Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson. 91 – 93.
“Conflicting Epistemological Selves in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass.” Reprinted in Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism on Frederick Douglass, Gale Literary Criticism Vol 350. Ser. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Farmington, Hills, MI: Gale/Cengage Learning. (2/23/2018).
"We've Seen This Before: The Pre-Obama Transnational Figure in Early Black Atlantic Writings." in Obama and Transnational American Studies Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2016.
Publications—Interview
“Interview with Nikky Finney.” Five Points 19.2 (Spring 2019), 1 – 16.