Stefanie Dunning

Stefanie DunningProfessor of English 
Affiliate, Black World Studies
Affiliate, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies


378 Bachelor Hall, Oxford Campus
513-529-7359
stefanie.dunning@MiamiOH.edu

Education

  • PhD, University of California, Riverside, 2001
  • MA, University of California, Riverside 
  • BA, Spelman College   

Teaching and Research Interests

  • African American Literature
  • American Literature
  • Film and visual culture
  • Literary and Cultural Studies
  • Nature Writing and Discourses
  • Science Fiction/Speculative Literature

Selected Publications

Books

  • Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021.
  • Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Articles/Essays/Reviews

  • Review of "Work!: A Queer History of Modeling," Forthcoming in The Journal of African American History, 2020.
  • "What is the Future? Weirdness and Black Time in Sorry to Bother You," Studies in the Fantastic, Fall 2020.
  • "Learn or Die: Survival and Anarchy in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower," Human Contradictions in Octavia Butler's Work, Palgrave/MacMillian, 2020.
  • Review of "A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire," and "Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis," in American Literature (2018) 90 (3): 654-656.
  • "Introducing Multiple Readings of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in the Classroom," Teaching (Con)Texts: Frameworks for Engaging Culture and Craft in American Literatures, McFarland, 2014.
  • Review of four works on mixed-race literature, in Signs, 2014
  • Review of Island of a Thousand Mirrors, in South Asian Review, December 2012.
  • “The Wounded City: Ambiguous Subjectivity and the riotous metropolis in Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren,” The Idea of the City (anthology) 2009.
  • “Ironic Soil: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism.” African American Review. 39: 1-2, 2005. This essay won the African American Review award at the 2006 MLA for Best 20th Century Literature essay of 2005.
  • "Brown Like Me: An Essay of Shifting Ideology." Mixing It Up. Eds. SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Spears. University of Texas Press, Fall 2004.
  • "Parallel Perversions: Interracial and Same Sexuality in James Baldwin’s Another Country.” MELUS 26:2 (Winter 2001). 95-115.
  • "Vegetarianism without Self-righteousness: The Politics of ‘Consciousness’ and Cultural Identity.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 2.3 (Winter 1999). 144-152.

Grants and Awards

  • Ford Postdoctoral Fellow.
  • African American Review awardee with essay, “Ironic Soil: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism” at the 2006 MLA for Best 20th Century Literature essay of 2005.

Work in Progress

Dr. Dunning is at work on a monograph titled "Other/World(ly): Black Ecologies of (Outer) Space," where she stages a textual analysis that combines her interests in Afrofuturism, temporality, and nature through readings of critical work about black ecology by J.T. Roane, Sharon Holland, Suzanne Cesaire, and others; as well as engaging primary texts by Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, and other Afrofuturists, and mainstream narratives about space exploration.