Kay R. Barrett

I study Black American and Black Diasporic literature and media from the 19th century to the present. My current research examines speculative reinterpretations of the past and future in Black horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, specifically how these visions  articulate negotiations of Black being. Through Black feminist theoretical and aesthetic frameworks, I analyze how Black speculative arts deconstruct embedded cultural narratives that cast Black bodies—especially the Black woman and/or queer body—as monstrous, alien, supernatural, and haunted. My dissertation project aims to connect the pessimistic Afro-Gothic to the optimism of Afrofuturism into one legible cultural tradition. In agreement with Tashima Thomas, my intervention situates the Black experience in the wake as “the original Gothic” and then asks: what comes next? 

My recent publication in Studies in the Novel, “Mythologies Uplifted: The New Woman of the Margins in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy,” reflects my early training in 19th century literature and longstanding interest in how Black women upend White-constructed representations of race, gender, and sexuality. Using Hortense Spillers’s concept of the counter-myth, I explore how Grand and Harper play with familiar narrative conventions—the mistaken identity plot and the tragic mulatta trope—to respectively imagine queer, anti-imperial, and Black New Woman figures.

Currently, I am a doctoral candidate in the English Department of Stanford University, funded by the Knight-Hennessy Global Leadership Fellowship. As a former Marshall Scholar, I also hold an MSt in English Literature (1830–1914) from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Intermediality: Literature, Film and the Arts in Dialogue from the University of Edinburgh.