Courtney Thorsson named Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellow

Courtney Thorsson named Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellow

Courtney Thorsson, associate professor of English, has been named a Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellow in the Liberal Arts for 2021-2023. The Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellows are awarded by the Collage of Arts and Sciences on the basis of their demonstrated excellence in teaching and their capacity for superior scholarship.

Thorsson researches African American Literature using Black feminist methods. Her book, Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels (University of Virginia Press, 2013) reconsiders the gender, genre, and geography of African American nationalism as she explores the aesthetic history of African American writing by women. Building on and departing from the Black Arts Movement, the literary fiction of such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison employs a cultural nationalism—practiced by their characters as “women’s work”—that defines a distinct contemporary literary movement, demanding attention to the continued relevance of nation in post–Black Arts writing. Identifying five forms of women’s work as organizing, dancing, mapping, cooking, and inscribing, Thorsson shows how these writers reclaimed and revised cultural nationalism to hail African America. Her next book is titled The Sisterhood: Black Women's Literary Organizing (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2022).