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Department of English

Emily Lordi

Professor of English
Edwin Mims Chair of English

Emily Lordi is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, a freelance arts critic, and the author of four books: Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (Rutgers UP, 2013); Donny Hathaway Live (Bloomsbury Academic 33 1/3 series, 2016); The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (Duke UP, 2020); and Holding Lightning: The Life, Loves, and Art of Whitney Houston (HarperCollins and White Rabbit [UK], forthcoming 2026). The Meaning of Soul was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and shortlisted for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Holding Lightning is the first full-length biography of the greatest singer of the 20th century.

Lordi has been featured in several music documentaries, including This is Pop (Netflix, 2021), American Masters: Roberta Flack (PBS, 2023), The Power of Protest (Apple TV, 2025), and the forthcoming Henry Louis Gates, Jr.-produced Black Music Mixtape (PBS). She serves as chair of the organizing committee for the national Pop Conference held annually at USC. Her criticism and reporting appear in New Yorker.com, NPR, Billboard, the Washington Post, and other outlets, especially T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she is a writer-at-large and where she has covered such subjects as Black addiction narratives and monumental sculptures, while also profiling such icons as Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah.

Representative publications

Books

  • Holding Lightning: The Life, Loves, and Art of Whitney Houston (HarperCollins, White Rabbit [UK], 2026)
  • The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke UP, 2020)
  • Donny Hathaway Live (Bloomsbury 33⅓ series, 2016)
  • Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (Rutgers, 2013)

Selected Criticism

  • “Relay is Riz Ahmed’s Latest Reinvention,” T, 2025
  • “Ali Sethi: How a Novelist Became a Pop Star,” T, 2024
  • “Nikki Giovanni Had the Confidence to Make an Art out of Mistakes,” Washington Post, 2024
  • Queen Latifah for T Magazine Greats issue, 2023
  • “Whitney Houston’s Enduring Legacy: Lifting Up Other Black Women,” T, 2023
  • “The Radical Experimentation of Black Psychedelia,” T, 2022
  • “The Black American Artists Leaving America,” T, 2021 
  • “The Misunderstood Talent of Gladys Knight,” New Yorker.com, 2021 
  • “Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories,” Boston Review, 2021 
  • “The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton,” T, 2020 
  • “FKA twigs Has Reached New Heights,” T, 2020 
  • “How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music,” New Yorker.com, 2019
  • “Reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming as a Motherhood Memoir,” New Yorker.com, 2019 
  • “The Artful, Erotic, and Still Misunderstood Funk of Betty Davis,” NewYorker.com, 2018 

Representative Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Between the World and the Addressee: Epistolary Nonfiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates and His Peers,” College Language Association Journal 60.4 (2017) - Winner of the Darwin T. Turner Best Essay Award, 2019
  • “Keyword: Soul," in Keywords for African American Studies, ed. R. Ferguson, E. Edwards, J. Ogbar, NYU Press, 2018
  • “Surviving the Hustle: Beyoncé’s Performance of Work,” Black Camera 9.1 (2017)
  • “‘black and going on women’: Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Alexander, and the Poetry of Grief,” Palimpsest 6.1 (2017)
  •  “Souls Intact: The Soul Performances of Audre Lorde, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone,” Women & Performance 26.1 (2016)
  • “Blues and Jazz Modernisms,” in The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, ed. Joshua L. Miller (2015)
  •  “‘Window Seat’: Erykah Badu, Projective Cultural Politics, and the Obama Era,” Post45 Peer Reviewed (2011)

Awards

  • The Meaning of Soul: Choice Outstanding Academic Title and shortlisted for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award, 2020
  • Darwin T. Turner Best Essay Award, 2017