SaraEllen Strongman

SaraEllen Strongman received her PhD in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently an LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests span African American literature, cultural and social history, gender and sexuality studies, and poetry and poetics.

Current Work:

Dr. Strongman's current manuscript, "The Sisterhood: Black Women, Black Feminism, and the Women's Liberation Movement," traces the development of Black feminism as an intellectual and activist tradition in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s as well as black women’s simultaneous participation in the Women’s Liberation Movement. She argues that a cohort of Black women novelists, poets, critics and academics built a distinct Black feminist movement while also working with second wave feminists and their organizations to reshape and expand the predominantly white feminist movement’s political platform. Using an intersectional framework, she reads published literary and academic works and an extensive body of archival materials to analyze the historical moment when Black women first named and claimed Black feminism as a movement separate from mainstream or “white” feminism.

Strongman takes seriously these women’s intellectual work, including their creative work, which built the field, complicating a narrative of the emergence of Black feminism that has become limited to several major voices by recovering networks and groups of women previously un- or under-studied. In doing so, she enriches the growing field of Black women’s intellectual history and deliver a detailed accounting of how Black women continued to shape feminist and anti-racist politics in the post-Civil Rights era as activists, artists, and scholars who worked across genres and in a variety of spaces.

Research Area Keyword(s):

Black feminism, gender, literature, feminism