Professor
Koritha Mitchell specializes in African American literature, violence throughout U.S. history and contemporary culture, and Black drama and performance. She examines how texts, both written and performed, have helped terrorized communities survive and thrive. Her study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011) won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her essay “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” appears in the March 2012 issue of American Quarterly, and her Callaloo journal article “Love in Action” identifies similarities between racial violence at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. Her second monograph, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, appeared in 2020, was named a best book of the year by Ms. magazine and Black Perspectives, and became a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2021. Mitchell is also editor of a scholarly edition of Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy and of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman. For the most comprehensive picture of Mitchell’s current projects and activities, please visit her website.