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Courtney Thorsson

Professor, English
Faculty Fellow, Clark Honors College
Clark Honors College, English
thorsson@uoregon.edu
Phone: 541-346-1473
Office: 244 PLC, 1286 University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-1286
Office Hours: On leave 2024-2025
Research Interests: African American Literary and Cultural Studies
Website: https://www.courtneythorsson.com/
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Statement

Courtney Thorsson teaches, studies, and writes about African American literature at the University of Oregon, where she is a Professor of English and a Faculty Fellow in the Honors College. Her first book Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels argues that Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise Black cultural nationalism in their novels of the 1980s and 90s. Her writing has appeared in publications including Callaloo; African American Review; MELUS; Gastronomica; Contemporary Literature; Legacy; and Public Books. Her second book, The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture tells the story of how a remarkable community of Black women writers and intellectuals transformed political, literary, and academic cultures. She is the recipient of a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of the research and writing of The Sisterhood.

Research

Left of Black episode, "The Sisterhood" of Black Feminist Writers Dr. Courtney Thorsson and Mark Anthony Neal, June 2024.

Interview by N'Kosi Oates, May 2024. Listen on New Books Network, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Faculty Talk: Courtney Thorsson and The Sisterhood, reading and discussion moderated by Ericka Warren and sponsored by the UO Alumni Association, Clark Honors College, and the UO Black Alumni Network. Online, April 2024.

"Making Toni Morrison," March 2024. Listen on WBEZ Chicago, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

“Black Women's Collectives,” panel, discussion, and book signing with Ethel Morgan Smith, Virginia Festival of the Book. Charlottesville, VA, March 2024.

"Celebrating 40 Years of the History of Black Writing & Black Women's Writing," a conversation with Ayesha Hardison, Angelyn Mitchell, and Danille Taylor, November 2023.

Interview by DuEwa Frazier, Nerdacity Podcast, March 2024. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Blog post, "Beyond the Famous Few: Five Women Who Shaped Black History and Literature," Columbia University Press, February 2024.

Interview by Jeff O'Neal, First Edition Podcast, Book Riot. November 2023.

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture, Columbia University Press (2023).

"The Chaneysville Incident and The Research Narrative in Contemporary African American Literature," Studies in the Novel. 55.1 (Spring 2023): 17-36.

"The Sisterhood, 1977 Photograph," Remarkable Receptions podcast, August 2022. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

  • Most downloaded episode of Remarkable Receptions, a Mellon-Funded Initiative of the History of Black Writing Project.

"Toni Morrison's Beloved," Remarkable Receptions podcast, June 2022. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Review of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture by Koritha Mitchell. Legacy 38.1-2 (2021): 163-65.

Panel discussion with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Patricia Spears Jones, "Creation Is Everything You Do: Shange, The Sisterhood, and Black Collectivity," Barnard College, March 2021.

"'They could be killing kids forever!': The Atlanta Child Murders in African American Literature," African American Review. 53.4 (Winter 2020): 315-332. 

  • Winner of the 2020 Weixlmann Prize for best essay in African American Review about 20th- and 21st-century literature.

"Fairy Tales of Race and Nation," Review of Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi. Public Books, April 9, 2019.

"The Musical History of Jelly," podcast episode with Psyche Williams Prof. Psyche-Wiliams Forson and host Dan Pashman, The Sporkful. August 2019. 

"Kitchen, Nation, Diaspora: Ntozake Shange's African American Foodways." Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society edited by Carlnita Greene. Peter Lang, 2018: 199-222.

"Foodways in Contemporary African American Poetry: Harryette Mullen and Evie Shockley." Contemporary Literature. 57.2 (Summer 2016): 184-215.

Co-author, "Black Women's Food Work as Critical Space." Gastronomica 15.4 (Winter 2015): 34-49.

"Gwendolyn Brooks's Black Aesthetic of the Domestic," MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 40.1 (2015): 149-76.

"James Baldwin and Black Women's Fiction." African American Review 46.4. (2013): 615-31.

Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels (Virginia 2013).

 

Contact:
Writing inquiries: Kathleen Anderson
Speaking inquiries: Annette Luba-Lucas
Email: thorsson@uoregon.edu
Website: courtneythorsson.com