Kianna Middleton

Biography

Kianna M. Middleton received her Ph.D. in African American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow for the John E. Sawyer Seminar titled, “Chronic Conditions: Knowing, Seeing, and Healing the Body in Global Africa” at the University of Kansas at Lawrence from 2019-2020. Middleton is a 2020 recipient of the Friedman Feminist Press Collection research grant at Colorado State University and was a 2018 John Money Fellow for Scholars of Sexuality at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her Masters research in Comparative Ethnic Studies examined queer Black and Chicana feminisms, literature, and differential consciousness. Currently, her work focuses on literary and medical representations of Blackness, disability, and intersex in the United States from the 1940s to the present. Middleton also researches critical pedagogy and the radical interventions of feminist, queer, and disability frameworks in teaching and learning. Middleton will offer undergraduate and graduate courses in feminisms and sexuality studies, Disability and Crip Studies, and race and medicine, with an emphasis on literary and archival research methods.

•  African American Studies
• Women of Color Feminist Theories
• Disability and Crip Studies
• Queer Studies and Queer of Color Critique
• Intersex Studies
• Feminist Science Studies
• Race and Medicine
• Feminist Pedagogy
• Literary Studies

Publications
Middleton, Kianna M. “Blackened Vulnerabilities and Intersex Mobility in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.”
Blackness and Disability: The Reprise, special issue of the College Language Association Journal, edited by
Therí A. Pickens, forthcoming.
“Of Paper Plates and Poetic Things: A Black Lesbian Pedagogy on the Horizon.” Explorations in Diversity:
Examining Complexities of Privilege, Discrimination and Oppression, 3 rd edition, edited by Sharon K.
Anderson and Valerie A. Middleton, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 253-260.
“Generational Survival, the Repetition of Memory, Autonomy and Empowerment in Gayl Jones’
Corregidora.” Praxis: Gender and Cultural Critiques, vol. 22, no. 1&2, 2010, pp. 47-56.