Areas of Study

Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century African American Literature, African American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies

Biography

DeLisa D. Hawkes is an African American Studies scholar and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of English and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program. Her current book project examines how New Negro Renaissance authors examined the intersecting experiences of Black and Indigenous communities in the United States influencing narratives of racial identity and kinship. Hawkes’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including J19, MELUS, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Langston Hughes Review, Studies in the Fantastic, Women’s Studies, North Carolina Literary Review, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée, and 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past.

Several fellowships and grants have supported Hawkes’s research and teaching, including support from the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the First Book Institute hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society, the Frank C. Munson Institute at Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. In 2024 and 2015, she was selected to participate in the NEH Summer Institutes titled “Towards a Peoples’ History of Landscape: Black and Indigenous Histories” and “Paul Laurence Dunbar and American Literary History,” respectively. She was honored with the Angie Warren Perkins Award at the 2024 Chancellor’s Banquet for her scholarship, teaching, and service.

Selected Publications

• “More Than a Black Rat Sonofab—-: Animality in Defining Americanness and the Human in Nambi E. Kelley’s Native Son.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, vol. 12, no. 1, 2023, 83-98. DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906873
• “Reparations and Passing in Pactolus Prime.” Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Works of Albion Tourgée, Eds. Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert S. Levine, Fordham UP, 2023, 57-69.
• “Hippolyta’s Awakening Through Spiritual Warfare in Lovecraft Country (2020).” Studies in the Fantastic, no. 12, 2022, p. 1-17, doi:10.1353/sif.2021.0010. 
• “To Fathom His Very Roots: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and ‘Evidence’ of His Literary Racial Passing.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, p. 69-80, doi:10.1353/jnc.2021.0008. 
• “‘My Uncle’s Cousin’s Great-Grandma Were a Cherokee,’ and I Am Descended from an Ashanti King: The American Blood Idiom in the Simple Stories.” The Langston Hughes Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 2021, pp. 29-46.
• “Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and New Negro Indigeneity.” MELUS, vol. 45, no. 3, 2020, pp. 104-128.