Her third book, “Soul Sounds”: The Afterlife in African American Literature and Music, is forthcoming fall 2026 from Fordham University Press. She is also at work on a born-digital project on Afrofuturism. Her second book, Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature, was published in March 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press.

My primary interest is in feminist theory and, more generally, issues of gender and sexuality whether in a theoretical context or within primary texts from Mansfield Park to Pulp Fiction.  My book on narratives of female development features chapters on Frances Burney and Jane Austen among others—and Austen is the single figure to whom I find myself returning most frequently.  I have edited the Norton Critical edition of Northanger Abbey and had something to say in print about most of Austen’s novels.   At the same time, my teaching and scholar

Lyndsey P. Beutin is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research focuses on the politics of the public memory of slavery and contemporary social movements. She is the author of Trafficking in Antiblackness: Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Canadian Communication Association and the 2024 Shepherd Book Prize in the Humanities from McMaster.

I help groups address complex public problems and conflicts in ways that strengthen communities and organizations when other forces are pushing them apart. After retiring from my salaried general faculty position in July 2025, I work part-time on a variety of collaborative change projects involving environment and land use, water, historic landscapes, community development, education, and health. 

At the heart of my work is a sustained inquiry into how individuals and communities make sense of their experiences within broader institutional and historical frameworks. I examine how people navigate systems and adapt to the conditions of their worlds. I ask how people create meaning that can be shared and transmitted to others. As a scholar-administrator, I am committed to making the academy a more equitable space for work and intellectual labor.

Lisa Woolfork is a scholar, sewist, podcaster, and community organizer whose work sits at the vibrant intersection of Black liberation, craft, and cultural studies. As an Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia, she has spent her career teaching and researching Black literary and cultural studies, with a focus on race, memory, and the ways Black women use art and storytelling to resist oppression and build community.

Francille Rusan Wilson is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. She is an intellectual and labor historian whose current research examines the intersections between black labor movements, black social scientists, and black women’s history during the Jim Crow era.