Biography
Crossing boundaries between African-American literature, visual art and cultural movements, Crawford’s scholarship opens new ways of understanding Black radical imaginations.
She is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania and is the Chair of the department. She is the author of What is African American Literature? (Wiley Blackwell, 2021), Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (Ohio State University Press, 2008). She is the co-editor of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and Global Black Consciousness (Duke University Press, 2018). Her essays appear in a wide range of books and journals, including American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Modern Drama, American Literature, The Psychic Hold of Slavery, The Trouble with Post-Blackness, The Modernist Party, Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Post-1945, Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in Black Freedom Struggle, Callaloo, Black Renaissance Noire and Black Camera.
Crawford is a member of the editorial board of the Society for Textual Scholarship, The James Baldwin Review, and the Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature.
She has an MA and PhD in American Studies from Yale University (1993 and 2000 respectively).
Born in Chicago in 1960, Crawford lives and works in Philadelphia.
SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023