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Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

2012 Ph.D. Graduate
Dissertation Advisor(s): Thadious Davis
"Interstitial Voices: The Poetics of Difference in Afrodiasporic Women's Literature"

Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College

(B.A. in Afro-American Studies, Smith College, 2003; M.A. in English and Creative Writing, Temple University, 2006)

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s research and teaching interests include African-American and Afrodiasporic literatures, gender and sexuality studies, contemporary American literature, and theories of difference. Her dissertation explores the connections between voice, identity, and narrative and poetic strategy in global black women’s literature from the post-civil rights era through the present moment.

Mecca has taught and assisted in courses on African-American literature, global literature, queer theory and politics, critical writing, and creative writing at Penn, Temple, and the Community College of Philadelphia. She has presented or will soon present research at the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the American Studies Association, as well as at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Symposium, the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, the Dissident Citizenship: Queer Postcolonial Belonging conference at the University of Sussex, and others. Her critical review essays have appeared in Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing and GLQ, and her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Best New Writing, American Fiction, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. A recipient of the 2009-2010 Dean’s Scholar award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Penn, Mecca is currently a Gaius Charles Bolin predoctoral/postdoctoral fellow in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Williams College.