Megan Sweeney

Megan Sweeney is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her publications include an award-winning monograph, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (2010); an edited collection, The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading (2012); a collection of lyric essays called Mendings (2023); numerous articles about African American literature, reading, incarceration, and autotheory; and lyric essays published in Brevity, The Normal School, and Bennington Review. Sweeney's scholarship has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Humanities Collaboratory at the University of Michigan, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Deeply committed to teaching, Sweeney has received the John D'Arms Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities (2021), the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award (2010), and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship (2014), the university's highest award for undergraduate teaching. She currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English Language & Literature and as Interim Editorial Director for Feminist Studies.