Matthew Omelsky

Matthew Omelsky is the Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African American Studies. He received his PhD in English from Duke University, where he was a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, and his MPS in Africana Studies from Cornell University. His research in African and African diasporic literature and film, black studies, critical theory, and the environmental humanities has appeared in Cultural Critique, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Research in African Literatures, among other venues. His current book project, Fugitive Time: African Diasporic Utopian Aesthetics, examines the intersections of black fugitivity and utopian desire in global African diasporic cultural production from Olaudah Equiano’s late-eighteenth century slave narrative to NoViolet Bulawayo’s twenty-first century fiction. The project traces how writers, filmmakers, and visual artists from the United States, Zimbabwe, Britain, Martinique, and Senegal inscribe into their works a sense of anticipation of release from subjection, as if to experience in advance the feeling of unequivocal bodily relief.