Diana Adesola Mafe
Diana Adesola Mafe is Professor of English at Denison University, where she teaches courses in postcolonial, gender, and black studies.
Her most recent book, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV (University of Texas Press, 2018), focuses on representations of black women in new millennial British and American speculative film and television. Her first book, Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), examines the trope of the “tragic mulatto” from a transnational perspective.
She has also published articles in MELUS, African American Review, Camera Obscura, The Journal of Popular Culture, Research in African Literatures, American Drama, English Academy Review, Frontiers, Safundi, and African Women Writing Resistance.
Works
Peer-Reviewed Books
Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV. University of Texas Press, 2018.
Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
“Sister Night, Hooded Justice, and Racial Reckoning in Watchmen.” Forthcoming in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
“Phoenix Rising: The Book of Phoenix and Black Feminist Resistance.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 46, no. 2, Summer 2021, pp. 43–63.
“Race and the First-Person Shooter: Challenging the Video Gamer in Bioshock Infinite.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, Sept. 2015, pp. 89–123.
“‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’: Agent 355 as an Original Black Female Hero in Y: The Last Man.” African American Review, vol. 48, no. 1–2, Spring/Summer 2015, pp. 33–48. *AAR Joe Weixlmann Award for the Year’s Best Essay in 20th- and 21st-century African American Literature.
“It’s the Master! (Step in Time): Hearts of Darkness and Postcolonial Paradoxes in Doctor Who.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 48, no. 3, June 2015, pp. 443–63.
“Ghostly Girls in the ‘Eerie Bush’: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl as Postcolonial Female Gothic Fiction.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 43, no. 3, Fall 2012, pp. 21–35.
“(Mis)Imagining Africa in the New Millennium: The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, Jan. 2011, pp. 69–99.
“Knowing Your Place.” African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices, edited by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez et al., University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, pp. 281–84.
“A Portrait of the (Tortured) Artist as a Young (Coloured) Man: Reading Arthur Nortje.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, Oct. 2008, pp. 427–55.
“Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 37–50.
“Self-Made Women in a (Racist) Man’s World: The ‘Tragic’ Lives of Nella Larsen and Bessie Head.” English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 66–76.
“Black Women on Broadway: The Duality of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls.” American Drama, vol. 15, no. 2, Summer 2006, pp. 30–47.
“From Ògún to Othello: (Re)Acquainting Yoruba Myth and Shakespeare’s Moor.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 35, no. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 46–61.
Invited Book Reviews
Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, by andre m. carrington. African American Review, vol. 50, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 81–82.
British and African Literature in Transnational Context, by Simon Lewis. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, May 2013, pp. 227–29.
Public Scholarship
“Jonathan Ferr’s ‘The Journey’ Shows Us that Love is the Way.” Afrofuturism: Blackness Revisualized Film Festival, All Arts, 6 January 2022.
“From Elmina Castle to Eldritch Suburbia: The Haunted House in African and African American Imaginaries.” Gothic Research Unit, Stanford University, January 2021.
“A Wrinkle in Time: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful.” Media Diversified, 23 April 2018.
“Normalising Black Women as Heroes: Star Trek Discovery as Groundbreaking.” Media Diversified, 6 March 2018.
“Where are the Black Women in Speculative Film and Television?” Denison Tedx Talk, March 2016.
Other
- 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend
- 2023-24 Charles A. Brickman Excellence in Teaching Award
- 2022 R. C. Good Faculty Fellowship
- 2020 African Literature Association Service Award
- 2019 African Studies Association Cover Art Prize
- 2018-23 James M. and Carolyn O. Gillingham Endowed Professorship
- 2016 African American Review Joe Weixlmann Award for Year’s Best Essay in 20th- and 21st-Century African American Literature
- 2015 R. C. Good Faculty Fellowship
- 2012-15 Suzanne B. and Theodore A. Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship
