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Meina Yates-RichardAssistant Professor of African American Studies & English

Meina Yates-Richard is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University. She earned her B.A. from the University of Houston and completed her M.A. and PhD, and Doctoral Certificate in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rice University. Professor Yates-Richard teaches courses about African American, American, and African diasporic literatures and cultures, focusing upon literary and social constructions of race and gender, as well as cultural memories of transatlantic slavery across these fields. Her research is situated at the intersections of sound, race, slavery, maternity and liberation ideologies in African American and African Diasporic literatures and cultural production. Professor Yates-Richard's work appears in American Literatureamsj: American Studies, the Journal of West Indian LiteratureFeminist Review and post45: Contemporaries.

Professor Yates-Richard is currently completing her monograph project tentatively titled Sonorous Passages: Maternal Soundings and the Black Liberation Imaginary. The monograph develops an analytical framework that places sound and its literary representations at the heart of contemporary debates concerning cultural trauma, Black feminism, auditory culture, and black liberation by studying the complex relationships between sonic production and reception, race, gender, slavery, and “freedom dreams” to theorize about the ways in which sound comprises an undertheorized aspect of the production of Black liberation ideologies in the African diaspora.