Home Department of English People Shelby Crosby

Shelby Crosby

Associate Professor, Coordinator of African American Literature

Phone
Email Only
Email
scrosby1@memphis.edu
Fax
901.678.2226
Office
Patterson 423
Office Hours
 
Shelby Crosby

Education

B.A., 1997, Morehead State University
M.A., 2002, State University of New York at Buffalo
Ph.D., 2007, State University of New York at Buffalo

Academic Summary

Dr. Crosby’s research begins in the nineteenth century and swerves into Afrofuturism (in all centuries). She continues to look at representations of Black womanhood, critical race theory and African American literature. Her research threads together critical race theory, black feminism, and literary historical frameworks to interrogate an American national story. Dr. Crosby’s currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled, Conversations with My Kindred weaves together literary nonfiction and literary/cultural critique, this innovative project will expand the definitions of memoir and provide salient critiques of governmental responses to national health crises, the ambivalence of motherhood, the absent racialized black father, and an examination of the importance of kindred and kin in the development of a healthy black child and community.

Select Publications

  • Crosby, Shelby and Terrence Tucker. "Afrofuturism: Past, Present, and Beyond." Special issue of CLA Journal 65.1. (March 2022).
  • God is Change. Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler. Co-edited with Aparijta Nanda, Temple University Press, June 2021.
  • "Trying to Understand: A Daughter's Prayer." The Feminist Wire. 19 March 2014. Web.
  • "Black Womanhood and Reiteration in Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods." CEAMAGazine: A Journal of the College English Association. March 2014.
  • "Black Girlhood Interrupted: Race, Gender, and Colonization in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber." Contemporary Speculative Fiction. Ed. M. Keith Booker. Massachusetts: Salem Press, 2013. 187-203.
  • "Conservative or a Visionary: The Journalistic Career of Zora Neale Hurston." Critical Insights: Zora Neale Hurston. Ed. Sharon Jones. Massachusetts: Salem Press, 2013. 209-229.
  • "Melville's Democratic America." Critical Insights: Herman Melville. Ed. Eric Link. Massachusetts: Salem Press, 2013. 163-179.
  • "Complicating Blackness: The Politics and Journalism of Zora Neale Hurston." Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography of Works of Criticism. Eds. Verner Mitchell & Cynthia Davis. New York: Scarecrow Press, 2013. 109-117.
  • "Language of Empowerment: My Love of Black Feminism," Black Feminism Journal, May 2012
  • "The Body Politic and Cultural Miscegenation in Hope Leslie or, Early Times in the Massachusetts" CLA Journal, December 2011.
  • "The Social Consciousness of Melville" accepted in Critical Insights: Herman Melville. Fall 2011