Nadia Ellis聽specializes in black diasporic, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures and cultures.
Her book, (Duke, 2015; Honorable Mention, William Sanders Scarborough Prize, MLA), explores forms of black belonging animated by queer utopian desire聽and diasporic aesthetics. It is a project built from a long-standing interest in following trajectories of literary聽cultures from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States. The work also developed through a聽preoccupation聽with several intersections, including those between queerness and diaspora,聽imperial identification and colonial resistance,聽performance and theory.
Published essays explore her work on聽queer and black performance, sexuality and the archive, and popular music, including Jamaican dancehall. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from such research bodies聽as the AAUW, the SSRC, and 91抖阴 Berkeley's Hellman Fund and Townsend Center for the Humanities. She teaches courses on a range of topics within her fields and regularly offers classes connecting literary cultures to questions of聽the city, migration, and sexuality and gender. She has received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award (2020) and the American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award聽(2016). 聽
The geographies聽of Ellis's training mirror聽(and have informed) her research interests: she received her PhD in English from Princeton; her M.Phil. in English from Oxford, and her B.A. in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies (Mona) Jamaica.
