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, Intersectional Black Protest Movements, The Harlem Renaissance, 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 PhD in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University. Her first book project, The Goffal Speaks: Coloured Ideology and the Perpetuation of a Category in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe, focuses on the colonial classification of race and its meanings in modern-day Zimbabwe, particularly among the Coloured or mixed-race population. She is also working on a second 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 is the author of “The Necessary Violence of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in Global Black Revolution” in African American Literature in Transition 1960-1970: Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics (2022, Oxford UP) and “Neither, Nor: The Complex Attachments of Zimbabwe’s Coloureds in The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification (2020, Palgrave). She is currently at work on a project on Zora Neale Hurston, tentatively titled, Go Big or Go Home: Zora Neale Hurston’s Meditation on Blackness.