Lisa B. Thompson

Lisa B. Thompson is professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The California native is the author of three books, Beyond The Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (University of Illinois Press, 2009), Single Black Female (Samuel French Inc., 2012), and Underground, Monroe, and The Mamalogues: Three Plays (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Her scholarship focuses on issues of identity, representation, and performance in contemporary African American culture. Thompson’s award-winning plays, which have been produced off-Broadway, throughout the US, and internationally, explore African American history and culture through the lens of the middle class.Her work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies; Harvard University’s W. E. B. DuBois Research Institute; the University of Texas at Austin Humanities Institute; the Michele R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research; the University of California’s Office of the President; the Five Colleges; Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; Hedgebrook; the Millay Colony for the Arts; and MacDowell.