Courtney Thorsson

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Statement

I teach, research, and write about African American Literature from its beginnings to the present.

Publications

"Fairy Tales of Race and Nation," Review of Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi. Public Books, April 9, 2019.

"Kitchen, Nation, Diaspora: Ntozake Shange's African American Foodways." Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society edited by Carlnita Greene. Peter Lang, 2018: 199-222.

"Foodways in Contemporary African American Poetry: Harryette Mullen and Evie Shockley." Contemporary Literature. 57.2 (Summer 2016): 184-215.

Co-author, "Black Women's Food Work as Critical Space." Gastronomica 15.4 (Winter 2015): 34-49.

"Gwendolyn Brooks's Black Aesthetic of the Domestic," MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 40.1 (2015): 149-76.

"James Baldwin and Black Women's Fiction." African American Review 46.4. (2013): 615-31.

Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels (Virginia 2013).

“Dancing Up A Nation: Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Callaloo 30.2 (Summer 2007): 644-52.

Publications

Kitchen, Nation, Diaspora: Ntozake Shange's African American Foodways

This chapter argues that Ntozake Shange's formally experimental 1998 cookbook, If I Can Cook / You Know God Can uses foodways—ways of preparing food and routes that foodstuffs travel—to theorize and prescribe practices of diaspora for Black people in the United States.

Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels

Book cover for "Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels"

In Women’s... Read more