Profile
Kelly M. Nims is an anthropologist by training and a former Peace Corps volunteer who has lived and worked in Africa, resulting in research and service that she brings to bear on the literature and cultural studies courses she teaches in her joint appointment in English and Women and Gender Studies. Her interests and research lie at the intersection of global black studies and identity, black feminism, and literary ethnography.
Dr. Nims’ courses on Zora Neale Hurston, Black Aesthetics, Black Historical Novels, The Harlem Renaissance, Hip Hop Feminism, Intersectional Black Protest Movements, The Politics of Colorism, and Black Women Writers speak to the interdisciplinarity of her work.
Dr. Nims completed her undergraduate degree in English at the University of Virginia and holds a Certificate in African Studies and a Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University. She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Go Big or Go Home: Zora Neale Hurston’s Meditation on Blackness, which engages Hurston’s work through Afrofuturistic notions of Black identity, agency, and freedom through art and exploration. Her next project is a monograph about miscegenation through an engagement with twentieth-century American literature, political anthropology, and critical race theory.
Dr. Nims has recently presented work at the African Studies Association and has published “The Necessary Violence of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in Global Black Revolution” in African American Literature in Transition: Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 2022) and "Neither/Nor: The Complex Attachments of Zimbabwe's Coloureds" in Measuring Mixedness: Counting and Classifying Mixed Race and Mixed Ethnic Identity Around the World (Palgrave, 2020).