Dr. SA Smythe completed their Ph.D. in history of consciousness (with emphases in literature and feminist studies) from UC Santa Cruz and will continue postdoctoral research here at UCI with Lilith Mahmud, Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies.
SA’s research interests include Black poetics, dispossession, créolité, meticciato, postcoloniality and decoloniality in Europe and Africa, cultural memory in the African diaspora, queer aesthetics, the Black Mediterranean, testimony, and the so-called “refugee and migration crisis.” At UCI, Smythe will develop their book manuscript, Crisis and the Canon: Shifting Representation Regimes in the Black Mediterranean. The book focuses on representations of blackness, femininity, and mobility in Italophone writings from 1985 to 2015. SA was awarded the prestigious UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship.