Spring 2018 seminar: Ph.D candidate, Africana studies
Amaris Brown is a second-year doctoral student in the Africana Studies and Research Center who is from Brooklyn, New York. A 2018 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, she earned her B.A. in African and Afro-American studies and sociology from Brandeis University, where she completed a thesis titled "A Taste of Blue Sky: Black Women Writing the Speculative in American Fiction." Her current research is situated at the intersection of narrative theory, literary and visual studies, and black feminism. Examining the relationships between and among the body, captivity, gender, sexuality, and time in African diasporic literary and visual culture, her work reads across textual performances of black queer life in the U.S. South and Spanish-speaking Caribbean throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Engaging the work of black feminist theorists of the body through the genres of speculative fiction and folklore, she addresses the erotic plurality of black life across time, methods of disciplining the body, and the significance of sensory data to study the social life of black pain and pleasure. Brown's seminar research investigates the sensory approaches through which fugitive bodies develop and utilize spatial knowledge for navigating familiar and unfamiliar geographies