Stephanie Li, Research Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies

Dr. Stephanie Li’s research is concerned with exploring the relationship between political rhetoric and literary narratives. Whether analyzing differing conceptions of freedom in nineteenth-century slave narratives or parsing the racial subtext of contemporary political rhetoric, she explores how personal and social resistance is vital to African American discourse. Her extensive writing on Toni Morrison, including a short biography published in 2009 and which is currently being revised for publication in 2028, has also been foundational to the ways in which she considers the contradictions and complex aims of American racial representation.

While Dr. Li was trained in English, her firm commitment to exploring race and racial representations in American and African American literature from the nineteenth- to the twenty-first century is enhanced by methodologies developed in the fields of African and African American Studies, American Studies, Gender Studies and Critical Race Studies. The enigma of race is at the heart of her scholarship. Both a fiction and a lived reality, race produces paradoxes of meaning and experience that she has sought to chart in her seven books. These complexities are perhaps best displayed in the monographs, Signifying Without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama (Rutgers UP, 2011) and Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (Oxford UP, 2015). While Signifying focuses on twenty-first-century texts and Playing in the White examines the postwar period, both books explore how racial categories are instantiated through coded language that can both reify and flaunt social hierarchies. Though most of her work has been dedicated to the study of African American literature, her most recent monograph, Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America (University of Minnesota, 2023), draws upon Black critical theorists to understand what whiteness means in texts by twenty-first-century white American writers.

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Office Phone:	(919) 684-2830
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Education:

Ph.D.	Cornell University	2005
M.F.A.	Cornell University	2004
M.A.	Cornell University	2003
B.A.	Stanford University	1998

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Li, S, Revised 2nd Edition, Toni Morrison: A Biography. Santa Barbara (2028), CA: Greenwood Press
2. Li, S, Toni Morrison: In Context (2027), ed. Cambridge University Press
3. Li, S, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E (Literature Since 1945, vol. E (2027), ed. WW Norton
4. Li, S, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Colson Whitehead (2027), ed. Modern Language Association of America
5. Li, S, Ugly White People Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America (October, 2023), pp. 326 pages, U of Minnesota Press, ISBN 9781452969909  [abs]