University of Houston

Visiting Scholar, African American Studies

Other Affiliations: Florida State University, Department of English
Georgia Southern University, English
University of California, Los Angeles, Afro-American Studies

Visiting Scholar

About

Dr.  Samuel earned her undergraduate English degree from Georgia Southern University and her MA in African American Studies from the University of California Los Angeles. She received her PhD. in English from Florida State University in 2006. Her area of research is Contemporary African American literature with an emphasis on Folklore and African Diasporic Religions.

Dr. Samuel has a forthcoming monograph, Conjuring Moments & Other Such Hoodoo: African American Literature, Women, & Spirit Work (Palgrave), on the conjure woman as a folk hero in literature. Her research engages the ways African American authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Tina McElroy Ansa have shifted, recycled, and reinvented healing women in twentieth century fiction. Arguing that the conjure woman is one of the most adept agents of mobility, resistance, and self-determination in the realm of African American womanhood, the objective of Dr. Samuel's study is to construct a historiography of the conjure woman in literature, which investigates various representations, the authority of power, the negotiation of gender and body politics, as well as how African-based spirit work often conflicts with Christian doctrines.

She is busy researching and writing a second monograph, tentatively titled "Envisioning Voodoo: African Diasporic Religion in the Popular Imagination, 1985-2010" which explores the performance of African-centered cosmological practices by black women in contemporary film and the subsequent treatment of the black female body associated with Spirit Work.

Other areas of interest include the novels of Tina McElroy Ansa, Toni Morrison, Sea Island heritage in literature, black women and the blues tradition, genealogical research, and the writing of family histories.

She is a member of the Modern Language Association, National Council for Black Studies, South Atlantic Modern Languages Association, College Language Association, and the Atlanta Metro Chapter of the African American Historical and Genealogical Society. 

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