Alexandria Smith

Alexandria Smith (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality in the Department of African American and African Studies, and is affiliated with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She works in the areas of Black feminist and queer literature and theory, writing and thinking about the roles of embodiment in life writing and theory, the ways that Blackness interacts with and disrupts conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how gendered discourses are constructed in Black cultural production. Her first book project, Black Gender Sensemaking, traces the role of embodied knowledge production in contemporary Black feminist literary work. 

Alexandria earned a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University and a BA in Comparative Women’s Studies and International Studies from Spelman College. She was a 2021 - 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

Her writing has been published in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Cultural Studies, Black Perspectives, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. 

Photo credit: Melody Robbins