Portia Owusu
  • Assistant Professor

Research Interests

  • Slavery
  • History
  • Memory
  • Trauma
  • Cultural Philosophy

 

Research Areas

  • Transnational Literatures
  • American Literature and Culture
  • Race and Ethnicity Studies
  • African American and African Diaspora Literature

Educational Background

  • Ph.D., University of London, 2017
  • M.A., University of York, 2010
  • B.A., University of Kent, 2008

Awards & Honors

  • US-UK Fulbright Award
  • Accountability, Climate, Equity, and Scholarship Fellowship

Selected Publications

    • Spectres from the Past: Slavery and the Politics of “History in West African and African-American Literature, New York: Routledge, 2020.

    Other Publications

    • “Slavery, Lived Realities, and the Decolonisation of Forced Migration Histories“ Migration Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022 co-authored with Estella Carpi.
    • “Of Life and Death: African Cultural Worldviews and Black American Survival in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship” (Accepted: forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies), 2022.
    • “Frantz Fanon and the Rhetoric of Violence in the Black Power Movement” in Raussert, Wilfried and Matti Steinitz. Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective Movements and Cultures of Resistance in the Black Americas. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2022.
    • “Fighting Fire with Fire: Violence and the Black Liberation Movement” in Perkins, Kathy     A., et al. The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2018.