Humanities In The Village: Melanie Marotta (With Samanda Robinson)
The Ivy Bookshop and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University present the latest installment of Humanities in the Village, featuring Dr. Melanie Marotta and her book African American Adolescent Female Heroes! Dr. Samanda Robinson will join Dr. Marotta in conversation.
African American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative investigates the application of the neo-slave narrative structure to the twenty-first-century young adult text.
Melanie A. Marotta is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University (Baltimore, MD). She also teaches as part of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor. Marotta’s research focuses on American Literature (in particular African American), Young Adult literature, the American West, Science Fiction, and gender studies. Her monograph, African American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative, was published by the University Press of Mississippi and part of the Children’s Literature Association Series (March 2023). She co-edited Critical Pedagogy: Diversity, Inclusion and the Visual in Higher Education (Routledge, 2021) included in the series, Race and Ethnicity in Education. Her collection, Women’s Space: Essays on Female Characters in the 21st Century Science Fiction Western, was published in 2019 as part of the Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy Series. Marotta is originally from Ontario, Canada.
Dr. Samanda Robinson is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarly and Creative Activity (URSCA) at Johns Hopkins University. She also is an Adjunct Professor at Morgan State University in the department of English and Language Arts. She researches Black speculation, Black science fiction and Afrofuturism. She has a chapter, “Seeing Red: ‘The Comet’ as an Anti-Lynching Fantasy” in the forthcoming collection, Afrosouthernfuturism. Dr. Robinson received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (’23) and has a B.A. from Fisk University (’17).
