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Autumn Womack specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century African American literary culture, with a particular interest in the intersection of literature, visual technologies, and archival practice. At Princeton, she teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-century African American literature and the history of race and media, including a course titled 'Toni Morrison Ethics Reading,' which extensively utilizes the Toni Morrison Papers housed at Princeton University Library. Professor Womack is the author of 'The Matter of Black Living: Aesthetic Experiment and Racial Data, 1880-1930' (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) and received the 2022 Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, in addition to being shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association’s Book Prize. This work explores the intimate relationship between black life and aesthetics, alongside emergent data regimes at the turn of the twentieth century. She is also the editor of the Norton Library’s edition of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel 'Marrow of Tradition' (Norton, 2023). In 2023, she led a critically acclaimed archival exhibition titled 'Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,' featuring previously unseen archival objects that illuminate Morrison’s creative process. Her curatorial work has spawned further projects, including a forthcoming book titled 'The Wanderer,' which investigates Morrison’s creative process and archival exploration, to be published by Knopf in 2025, and a collaborative volume of essays examining the relationship between Toni Morrison and black archival practice.
Department of English, Princeton University • Princeton, NJ
Teaches classes on 19th- and 20th-century African American literature and engages in archival research.
GRE scores are not accepted. Ph.D. is the primary degree; students are not required to hold an M.S.E. prior to admission.