Elleza Kelley

Elleza Kelley is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the departments of English and African American Studies, and she will join the FAS ladder faculty as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2022. Kelley is interested in art, space, and black aesthetics. She specializes in African American literature, with an emphasis on black geographies and radical spatial practice in the United States. Her current research traces how black spatial knowledge and practice appear in literature and art, particularly through experimentations with form, genre and media. Her book project looks at practices of inscription and mark-making as modes of spatial production, representation, and reinvention. The project contends that black geographies both demand and usher forth specific and unconventional methods and reading practices. As such, her work is also concerned with methodology—how we read, how we engage with archives, and how we do literary study. She has published work on Toni Morrison’s theories of place and geography, which is the subject of her next project. Her writing can be found in The New Inquiry, Cabinet Magazine, and elsewhere.