Michelle M. Wright

Born in Rome, Italy and raised there as well as Rabat, Morocco; Florence, Italy; The Hague, Holland and Waterloo, Belgium as the daughter of an African American diplomat and Polish-Czech American school teacher, Michelle M. Wright received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Oberlin College in 1992 and her Ph.D. in the same from the University of Michigan in 1997. She has served on the faculties of Carnegie Mellon University, Macalester College, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Northwestern University.

Michelle M Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Duke UP 2004), co-editor of The Black German Experience, a special issue of the journal Callaloo with Tina Campt (2003); co-editor with Faith Wilding and Maria Fernandez of the anthology Domain Errors: A Cyberfeminist Handbook (Autonomedia Press, 2003) and Blackness and Sexualities, co-edited with Antje Schulman (Lit Verlag Berlin, 2006). Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, is her most recent book (UMN Press, 2015). She is also, with Jodi Byrd, co-editor of the new book series Critical Insurgencies, in cooperation with the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) and Northwestern University Press.

Michelle is currently at work on a new book project, Feeling Europe: Black Affect in the Heart of Empire, which looks at the construction of Europe through travel narratives written by authors, artists and activists from across the African Diaspora from the 19th century to today.