Alexandria Smith works in the areas of Black feminist and queer literature and theory. She writes and thinks about the roles of embodiment in life writing and theory, the ways that Blackness interacts with and disrupts conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how gendered discourses are constructed in Black cultural work. She is at work on her first book project, an exploration of the distinct and sometimes competing conceptions of Black womanhood produced within Black feminist, queer and trans studies.

Alexandria earned a Ph.D. in women’s, gender and sexuality studies from Rutgers University and a bachelor’s in comparative women’s studies and international studies from Spelman College. She was a 2021-2023 postdoctoral fellow in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, where she is excited to continue as an assistant professor.

Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Cultural Studies, Black Perspectives, The New Inquiry and elsewhere.

This fall, Alexandria will teach “Life Writing in the Black Diaspora” and “Black Genders,” both of which she adapted from courses she taught as a postdoctoral fellow. She looks forward to continuing to develop classes that teach students to engage the productive intersections of lived experience and knowledge production.