Doctoral Candidate English Language and Literature
she, her, hers
About
**On leave for the 2024-2025 school year**
LaTara McLemore is a doctoral candidate in the English Language and Literature program. Her research is in 20th century African American literature, where she studies speculative fictions by Black Women Writers after the Civil Rights Movement. LaTara’s dissertation project analyses these writers' use of socially ostracized characters, in light of the various historical and political movements unfolding in the US (and globally!) during the last decades of the twentieth century. Read through and alongside Diasporic Theory, Black Feminist Theory, Afropessimism, and temporal studies, LaTara’s work asks how characterization reveals--and complicates--our understanding of the African American experience both in the recent past, and in our present.
Outside of academia, you can find LaTara hanging out with her sweet (but very mischievous) cat, Nathaniel, and trying (but failing) to bake a sweet potato pie as good as her grandmother’s.
