Jennifer D. Williams (NHC Fellow, 2019–20)

Fellowship Work Summary, 2019–20

Jennifer D. Williams spent the fellowship year working on her book Intimate Cities: Black Women’s Literature and Urban Segregation. She revised the first two chapters and added new research into a third chapter. As a result of that new research, she wrote “‘An Elegy of Place’: Affective Mapping in June Jordan’s Civil Wars” for A/B: Autobiography Studies. Williams also presented her research nationally and locally. “‘Between the Dry Hours’: Black Feminism and the Queer Urban Domestic,” presented at the American Studies Association Conference, is based on the book’s fifth chapter. “Architextural Reparations in June Jordan’s ‘Skyrise for Harlem’ and Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca,’” an invited talk she gave as part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Colloquium, resulted from a draft of the book’s fourth chapter.