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Department of English

Emily Lordi

Professor of English
Edwin Mims Chair of English

Emily Lordi is a writer, professor, and cultural critic whose focus is African American literature and Black popular music. She is professor of English at Vanderbilt University and the author of three books: Black Resonance (2013), Donny Hathaway Live (2016), and The Meaning of Soul (2020). In addition to scholarly articles on topics ranging from literary modernism to Beyoncé, she writes essays for such venues as New Yorker.com and The Atlantic, and appears in documentaries such as the BBC series Soul America and the Netflix series This is Pop. She is a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where her recent work includes profiles of FKA twigs and Dolly Parton, as well as essays on Black recovery from addiction and African American artists who have left the U.S.

Representative publications

Representative Publications: 

  • Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (Rutgers, 2013)
  • Donny Hathaway Live (Bloomsbury 33⅓ series, 2016)
  • The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke UP, 2020)

 

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)

 

Selected Public Scholarship:

  • “The Black American Artists Leaving America,” T, August 2021 
  • “The Misunderstood Talent of Gladys Knight,” New Yorker.com, August 2021 
  • “Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories,” Boston Review, April 2021 
  • “The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton,” T, December 2020 
  • “FKA twigs Has Reached New Heights,” T, October 2020 
  • “Eulaulah Hathaway on Her Musical Marriage to Donny Hathaway,” New Yorker.com, February 2019 
  • “Reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming as a Motherhood Memoir,” New Yorker.com, February 2019 
  •  “The Artful, Erotic, and Still Misunderstood Funk of Betty Davis,” NewYorker.com, May 2018 
  • “Nikki Giovanni: ‘Martin Had Faith in the People,’” The Atlantic, April 2018 
  •  “Luminous Loss,” review of Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2015 
  • “Why is Academic Writing So Beautiful? Notes on Black Feminist Scholarship,” The Feminist Wire, March 2014