Nadia Ellis

Biography

Nadia Ellis specializes in African diasporic, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures and cultures.

Her research traces the trajectories of literary and expressive cultures from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States and she is most intellectually at home at various intersections: between the diasporic and the queer; imperial identification and colonial resistance; performance and theory; migrancy and domesticity. She teaches classes on postcolonial literature and the city, black diasporic culture, queer theory, and US immigrant literature.

Her book, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Duke, 2015) explores structures of black belonging at the intersection of queer utopianism and diasporic aesthetics of desire, disavowal, and elusiveness. Published and forthcoming essays are on such topics as sexuality and the archive in postwar London, electronic musics and political disaster in Kingston and New Orleans, and performance cultures in contemporary and Emancipation-era Jamaica. 

Her research has been supported by the AAUW, the SSRC, and the Hellman Faculty Fellows Fund, and she has been a fellow at Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Institute for International Studies.

She received her PhD in English from Princeton University in 2008, specializing in postcolonial and modern British literature. She also has an MPhil in English from Oxford University and a BA in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies (Mona) Jamaica.