Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Science
Project: Black Reading
Sonya Posmentier is a scholar of Black diasporic literature and culture. She teaches classes in African American and Caribbean literature, American literature, environmental literature, and poetry. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book argues that extreme environmental experiences such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes as well as the slower social disaster of enforced agricultural enslavement have shaped black modern literature and culture, and in particular poetic forms. As a fellow at the Center for the Humanities, she will be working on a new book, Black Reading, about the intersecting histories of black cultural studies and modern lyric theory. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books and elsewhere. She is also a member of the NYU Sanctuary faculty coalition and a co-author of the Sanctuary Syllabus.