Kelly M. Nims

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 that 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, 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 she holds a Ph.D. 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 has two forthcoming articles, “The Necessary Violence of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in Global Black Revolution” in an essay collection on the black 1960s (Oxford UP) and a contribution to Measuring Mixedness: Counting and Classifying Mixed Race and Mixed Ethnic Identity Around the World (Palgrave).