Meina Yates-RichardAssociate Professor of African American Studies and English

Meina Yates-Richard is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University. She earned her B.A. from the University of Houston and completed her M.A. and PhD, and Doctoral Certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rice University. Professor Yates-Richard teaches courses about African American, American, and African diasporic literatures and cultures, focusing upon sonic, literary, and social constructions of race and gender, as well as cultural memories of transatlantic slavery across these fields. Professor Yates-Richard's work appears in American Literature, amsj: American Studies, the Journal of West Indian Literature, Feminist Review and post45: Contemporaries. 

Professor Yates-Richard’s monograph, Sonorous Passages: Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberation Imaginary is forthcoming in November 2026 from Duke University Press. The monograph studies the complex relationships between sonic production and reception, race, gender, slavery, and “freedom dreams” to theorize about the ways in which what she terms “Black maternal sonority” comprises an undertheorized aspect of the production of Black liberation ideologies in the African diaspora. In Sonorous Passages, Professor Yates-Richard also offers the Black feminist critical heuristic “double listening” as a model of textual engagement that unearths heretofore misrecognized and undertheorized aspects of Black Atlantic textual production. 

She is currently at work on her next monograph project, tentatively titled Slavery and the Acoustics of Domination, a study situated at the intersections of race, sonics, affect, masculinity, violence, and citizenship in American literature and culture. 

Selected Publications: 

Book:  Sonorous Passages: Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberation Imaginary (Duke UP, forthcoming November 2026) 

 Selected Articles/Book Chapters: 

“‘Hell you Talmbout?’: Janelle Monáe’s Black Cyberfeminist Sonic Aesthetics” for “Sonic Cyberfeminisms” special issue of Feminist Review Issue 125: 35-51, March 2021.  

“In ‘the Wake’ of the ‘Quake: Mary Ellen Pleasant’s Diasporic Hauntings” for “New Directions in Black Western Studies” special issue of American Studies Vol. 58, No. 3: 37-58, October 2019. 

“Refusing Daffodils: The Resistant Pedagogies of Michelle Cliff’s Abeng,”Journal of West Indian Literature Vol. 27, No. 1: 32-49, April 2019. 

“‘WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER’S NAME?’ Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in Black Nationalist Literature,” American Literature Vol. 88, No. 3: 477-507, September 2016. 

• Recipient of 2016 Norman Foerster Prize for best essay published annually in American Literature. 

“Hearing What Black Women Have Been Telling Us All Along: On Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought” for MLA 1990 at 30 Dossier, post45: Contemporaries May 2020. 

“Sounds and Signs of Black Womanhood.” In Ralph Ellison in Context, ed. Paul Devlin. Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 137-146.