Shanna Greene Benjamin is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College where she teaches African American and American literature and culture, serves as faculty coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program, and advises students interested in the Spelman or Morehouse off-campus study programs. A specialist in African American literature and culture, Professor Benjamin teaches surveys in African American literature and nineteenth-century American literature, seminars on neo-slave narratives, black women writers, and black literature beyond race, and Mellon Mays workshops on preparing for the professoriate. Her current research projects include “Race, Faces and False Fronts: Shakespearean Signifying in The Colored American Magazine,” “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Texts and/as Textiles of African American Women,” “Variations on a Theme: Wanda Coleman and the African American Sonnet Tradition,” and “A Context for Creation: Kara Walker’s Harper’s History of the Civil War (Annotated).” She graduated from Johnson C. Smith University and received her M.A. in Afro-American Studies and Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Benjamin is at work on a biography of Nellie Y. McKay.
Melon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program
Fall 2011 Obermann Scholar in Residence: http://obermann.uiowa.edu./people/shanna-greene-benjamin
Faculty Success Program Certified Coach: http://www.facultydiversity.org/?page=About_Us_FSPCoaches
