Joanna Davis-McElligatt Ph.D.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of North Texas, and Affiliate Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies, and LGBTQ+ Studies. She is at work on her first monograph, entitled Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora (The Ohio State University Press, under contract). Black Aliens examines extraterrestrial and interdimensional aliens who emerge in Black speculative media and culture as figural representations of a cosmic diasporic experience and as charged metaphors for Black fugitivities and escape. Through a study of prose, poetry, and film, record albums, comic books, illustrations and amateur drawings, and art installations and exhibition catalogues, Black Aliens traces how Black artists and visionaries—Octavia Butler, Maisy Card, Dwayne McDuffie and M.D. Bright, and Sun Ra—visualize and imagine aliens who have the appearance of being and are in visuosocial, sociopolitical, phenomenological, ontological, affective, and material relation with the terrestrial descendants of enslaved Africans—or, in other words, aliens whose bodies and beings are subject to interpellation as Black on Earth. Represented by the figures of the enslaved and their descendants, ghosts in the afterlife, time travelers and interstellar voyagers, extraterrestrial beings, space immortals, and abductees, Black aliens are inherently disruptive figures—beings-on-the-move, spatiotemporally out-of-joint, typified by migration, flight, escape, with a bent toward navigation and peregrination rather than stasis and stagnation. 

She is the co-editor of five volumes: Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (UP of Mississippi 2022), BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence (UP of Mississippi 2024), bell hooks’ Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, under contract) and Afrosouthernfuturism (in progress), 

Her areas of teaching and research include Africana Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Literary Theory, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comics Studies, Southern Studies, and 20th and 21st century U.S. Literary Studies. She is currently serving as the Immediate Past President of the Comics Studies Society. Before joining UNT, she spent nine years at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Recent Publications

2024 “White Black Men and Black White Men: Reading Race as Violence in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro.” BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence. Eds. Jim Coby and Joanna Davis-McElligatt. UP of Mississippi. 83-99. 

2023 “Black Looking and Looking Black: African American Cartoon Aesthetics.” The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel. Eds. Fabrice Leroy, Jan Baetens, and Hugo Frey. Cambridge UP: 193-209. 

2022 “Migration—Spotlight: Gayl Jones.” The Routledge Companion to Literature of the American South. Eds. Monica Miller, Katherine Burnett, and Todd Hagstette. Routledge: 245-247. 

2022 “On Thingification: Faulkner and Afropessimism.” The New William Faulkner Studies. Eds. Sarah Gleeson-White and Pardis Dabashi. Cambridge UP: 166-182. 

2022 “Toward a Pedagogy of Pain.” The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies. Eds. Christopher Lloyd and Hilary Emmett. Routledge. 199-210. 

2022 “And now she sings it”: Conjure Healing as Abolitionist Alternative in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.” Special Issue: Mass Incarceration in the U.S. South. Eds. Katie Owens-Murphy and Jeanine Weeks Schroer. Mississippi Quarterly 74.1: 103-123. 

2021 “Queering the Mammy: Southern Black Domestics and Revolutionary Mothering as Social Practice.” Through Mama’s Eyes: Unique Perspectives on Southern Matriarchy. Eds. Cheylon Woods and Kiwana McClung. U of Louisiana P. 33-46. 

2021 “A Heritage Unique in the Ages: Politics, Race, and Gender in Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South.” A History of the Literature of the U.S. South. Ed. Harilaos Stecopoulos. Cambridge UP: 203-214. 

2019 “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Teaching Black Lives Matter in Louisiana.” Special Issue: #southernsyllabus. Ed. David A. Davis. south: a scholarly journal 50.2: 114-125. 

Illustrator/Artist

2023 “10 Commandments of Being Black and Punk.” Black Punk Now. Eds. Chris Terry and James Spooner. 3-page comic. 

2020 Educating for Social Justice: Field Notes from Rural Communities. Eds. Rebekah Cordova and William Reynolds. Leiden, Boston: BrillSense. 10 illustrations.

2019 “2019 Predictions: Opelousas Will Survive.” Little Village Magazine #255. January 3. Full-page comic.

Recent Courses

Graduate Seminars

Spring 2025 ENGL 5650: The Black Atlantic

Spring 2024 ENGL 5620: Speculative Southscapes

Spring 2023 ENGL 5620: Recent Futures

Spring 2022 ENGL 6820: Intersectional Feminisms

Undergraduate Courses

Spring 2025 ENGL 4285: The Black Atlantic 

Fall 2024 ENGL 4280: Black Futures

Spring 2023 ENGL 4670: Be Gay Do Comix!

Spring 2022 ENGL 4260: Black and Immigrant: Lit & Culture

Fall 2022 ENGL 4820: I Am Not Your Negro: Forms of Black Resistance; ENGL 2326: An American Demonology