Kristin Moriah is an Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 2022 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Black Digital Research and the Pennsylvania State Humanities Institute. She is the most recent recipient of the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara prize and one of the inaugural recipients of the Queen’s University Black Scholars Excellence in Mentorship awards. Her writing can be found in American Quarterly, C Magazine, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada and Canadian Theatre Review. She is is the editor of the first volume of scholarly essays about Mary Ann Shadd Cary, which will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2024.
African American literature and culture; Black Studies; Sound Studies; Performance Studies
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
- 2023 “Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives.” American Quarterly, June 2023. (Invited)
- 2023 “That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It: Hearing Blackness,” English Studies in Canada/ESC 46.2–3. (June/September 2023): 33–37. (Invited)
- 2022 “What Will We Do with All That Data?” American Periodicals. (Invited Forum Introduction)
- 2021 “On the Record: Sissieretta Jones and Black Feminist Recording Praxes.” Sound Acts special issue of Performance Matters 6.2. February 2021.
- 2020 “A Rude Sound: Notes on Suck Teeth Composition,” Sound and Performance special issue of Canadian Theatre Review 184. October 2020. (Invited)
- 2020 “A Greater Compass of Voice: Black Feminist Performance and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century North America.” Race and Performance in the US-Canada Borderlands special issue of Theatre Research in Canada 41.1, June 2020. pp. 20-38.
- 2015 “Other People's Cabin's: German Inversions of Uncle Tom's Cabin.” Lateral 4: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Island Lake, IL: The Cultural Studies Association.
- 2008 “In the Shadow of the Negro: Race and Performance in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno”. Peer English 3: pp. 37-52.
BOOK CHAPTERS
- 2023 “Another Link to Life”: Black Feminist Geography, the Digital Humanities and in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Teaching Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Lynn Domina. Modern Language Association (forthcoming).
- 2023 “From Ballad Opera to Minstrelsy: Interrogating Social Class, Race, Gender, and Nation on the Musical Stage,” in The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre. Ed. Ryan Donovan and Laura MacDonald. (Invited)
- 2022 “Sounding Black Print Culture at the Edges of the Black Atlantic.” New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture. Ed. Jesse W. Schwartz and Daniel Worden. Bloomsbury. (Invited)
- 2013 "I am Not a Race Man: Racial Uplift and the Post-Soul Aesthetic in Percival Everett’s I am Not Sidney Poitier”. Understanding Blackness through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anne Cremieux, Xavier Lemoine, Jean-Paul Rocchi. Palgrave McMillan: pp.221-236.
I am interested in supervising graduate students with strongly articulated research interests in Black Studies, Sound Studies, Performance Studies and African American Literature.
SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS & GRANTS
FELLOWSHIPS
- 2022 Just Transformations Fellowship. The Center for Black Digital Research, Pennsylvania State University.
- 2022 Visiting Scholar in Residence. Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute.
- 2017-2018 Helena Rubinstein Fellowship, Whitney Museum of American Art (declined)
- 2017-2018 Emory University Rose Library Fellowship (declined)
- 2017-2018 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities
- 2017 The New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry Fellowship
GRANTS
- 2023 Queen’s University Faculty of Arts and Science Conference Fund, Grant
- 2023 SSHRC Institutional Grant, Queen's University
- 2021 SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Papers Worthy of Patronage,
- 2021 SSHRC Connection Grant [Co-Applicant], Black Studies Summer Seminar,
- 2020 Arts and Science Dean’s EDI Grant, Queen’s University
- 2019 SSHRC Institutional Grant, Queen’s University
- 2018 Experiential Learning Hub Grant, Queen’s University
- 2018 Research Initiation Grant, Queen’s University
- 2018 Rare Book School NEH-GBHI Scholarship, The University of Virginia
AWARDS & PRIZES
- 2023 Black Scholars Excellence in Mentoring Award, Queen’s University
- 2022 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize, American Studies Association
- 2022 Mayor’s Arts Awards: Arts Champion Award (Skeleton Park Arts Festival), City of Kingston
- 2017 The Melvin Dixon Prize for the Best Dissertation in African American Studies, The CUNY Graduate Center
In the News
On ASALH-TV’s In Retrospect and Prospect S2, E3 “#DigBlk: Black History in the Digital Sphere” Dr. Moriah and Dr. Gabrielle Foreman and Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner, the co-directors of the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State, discuss their ongoing research collaboration and partnership.
