Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Dual-Title Ph.D. Degree in English and African American and Diaspora Studies
The Pennsylvania State University
2023

Master of Arts (M.A.)

English
The Pennsylvania State University
2019

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Literatures in English
University of California, San Diego
2016

Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century African American Literature

Sabrina Evans specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American Literature, with a particular focus on Black women's writing, archives, and organizing; Black feminism; and Black Digital Humanities.

African American Literature to 1940

Course Overview: In this course, students will be introduced to the major authors, genres, journals, themes, movements, and debates that have shaped the African American literary tradition. We will explore the cultural experiences of African/African Americans who helped shape the growth of the United States from its earliest beginnings through the early 1940s. Through examining selections of poetry, novels, short stories, essays, articles, and pamphlets, students will expand upon their definition of “literary” to encompass the diversity of African American literary production, culture, and history.  

Satellite Partnership Grant with the Center for Black Digital Research at the Pennsylvania State University; 2023-24

The Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) Summer Graduate Fellowship

Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR) Fellowship at the Pennsylvania State University

Book Review: Riding Jane Crow

Book Review: Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad

Brittney Cooper's Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women inaugurated a new direction in Black feminist scholarship that centered “embodied discourse” or a “form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies in the texts they write and speak” in the way that we study Black women's lives and intellectual thought. Miriam Thaggert's Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad continues in that same vein, writing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American women into American railroad history by detailing their negotiations of respectability politics and the sociospatial race and gender politics that limited their mobility.