|
Contact Information:
457 Bartlett Hall
UMass
Amherst, MA 0l003
p: 413-545-5512
f: 413-545-3880
elordi@english.umass.edu |
Assistant Professor
Emily J. Lordi
Emily Lordi teaches and writes about contemporary African American literature and black popular culture, especially music. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2009, worked as a visiting assistant professor at Cornell from 2009-2011, and joined the UMass English Department in 2011.
Her first book, Black Resonance, reveals aesthetic connections between the literary works of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, Nikki Giovanni, and Linda Susan Jackson and the vocal art of several iconic women singers: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and Etta James. According to the musical-literary tradition this book presents, the expressive innovations of major writers and popular women singers resonate most clearly when heard together.
Professor Lordi’s next book will be a literary and musical history of the concept of “soul.” Other projects include a study of poet Lucille Clifton and an article on multiethnic dance training films such as Fame.
Recent Work:
Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature, forthcoming October 2013:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Resonance-Literature-Literatures Initiative/dp/081356249X
“Window Seat”: Erykah Badu, Projective Cultural Politics, and the Obama Era, Post45 Peer Reviewed (December 2011):
http://post45.research.yale.edu/2011/12/window-seat-erykah-badu-projective-cultural-politics-and-the-obama-era
Fading Out: White Flight and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand!” Journal of Popular Music Studies 24.3 (September 2012)
Jazz and Blues Modernisms, in The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, ed. Joshua L. Miller, forthcoming 2014
Review essay on The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin, ed. Randall Kenan, African American Review, forthcoming 2013
Review of Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture, by Marisa Parham, Callaloo 34.3 (Summer 2011)
On Leave Fall 2013
Spring 2014 Courses:
African American Literature, 1970-Present (371)
James Baldwin (Graduate, 891AU)
Recent Courses:
African American Literary Studies (Graduate 758)
African American Music and Literature (Graduate 891 & 491AK)
Black Memoir (300)
American Fiction (376)
American Identities (270)
|
