Dr. Amani Morrison is Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in GU's English Department. A Virginia native, she earned her Ph.D in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, her M.A. in African American Studies from UC Berkeley, and her B.A. (magna cum laude) from University of Richmond. Morrison was an inaugural CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Data Curation in 2019-20 at the University of Delaware with the award-winning Colored Conventions Project and was a 2018-19 Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis in African and African American Studies.
Dr. Morrison holds expertise in 20th-century African American literature, race and space studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and the urban and digital humanities. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Bancroft Library, the University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections, the University of California Consortium for Black Studies, and others. Her research has been awarded by the National Council for Black Studies and was shortlisted for the American Studies Association's Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for Best Dissertation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Quarterly, Meridians, Environment and Society, African American Review, and The Common Reader. Dr. Morrison is writing the first cultural history of Chicago's mid-twentieth-century kitchenette apartments.
She will serve as Lead Principal Investigator for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Georgetown on "Creative Placemaking, Black Restorative Ecologies, and Black Spatial Futures" in 2023 and 2024. In this role, Dr. Morrison will manage the grant, offer support for a postdoctoral fellow and two dissertation fellows, and work with co-investigators to provide collaborative exploration and programming activities for the campus and greater DC community.