In fall 2023, the Black Studies Program will welcome distinguished scholar Simone Drake, the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University for a one-year fellowship at Denison.
During that time, she will help guide the Black Studies Program in curricular conversations, in imagining future directions, and in hiring faculty in the Black Studies program. Drake will teach one course each semester: African Americans and the Law in the fall 2023 and Gendering Black Citizenship in Law and Culture in spring 2024.
“Simone’s interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on how people of African descent in the Americas negotiate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation through the lenses of critical race, gender, and legal studies,” says Linda Krumholtz, professor of English and Black Studies, and director of the Center for Black Studies at Denison. “She is particularly interested in how the humanities do and should inform public policy and law.”
Drake is the author of When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making (University of Chicago Press 2016) and Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Louisiana State University Press 2014, Southern Literary Studies Series); co-editor (with Dwan Henderson) of Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press 2020); and numerous journal articles and book chapters; and the editor of The Oxford Handbook on African American Women’s Writing (in progress).
Drake has been a professor at Ohio State University since 2008. She is a faculty affiliate at the Moritz College of Law, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Department of African American and African Studies, and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Drake earned her BA from Denison in Classical Civilization and English in 1997. She earned her PhD. in English from University of Maryland in 2007, and she earned a Masters in the Study of Law from OSU in 2013.
We are very excited that Simone will be joining us!
