Alisha Knight

Dr. Alisha Knight is a Professor of English and American Studies and the inaugural Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Senior Equity Officer at Washington College.  She works collaboratively to help shape and implement the College’s strategic plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Key priorities under her purview include fostering an inclusive learning environment for all students and recruiting, developing, and retaining diverse faculty and staff within Academic Affairs.

Dr. Knight specializes in African American literature and print culture at the turn of the twentieth century.  Her teaching and scholarship favors interdisciplinarity, as she aims to expand the canon with lesser known authors and bring new perspectives to well-known ones. She recently co-edited a scholarly edition of Pauline Hopkins’s novel, Hagar’s Daughter, for Broadview Press, and ​she is currently researching the early twentieth-century African American book trade. ​She is the 2020 recipient of the Alumni Association's Distinguished Teaching Award ​and the 2020 Cromwell Award for Innovation in Teaching.

Teaching

Dr. Knight teaches introductory and advanced literature and American Studies courses at Washington College.  She strives to mentor students—majors and non-majors alike—to become careful, critical readers and astute, analytical writers.  She draws inspiration from Earl Lewis’s assertion, “Intellectual work is the foundation of social change,” and she aspires to empower students to become change agents.  For example, in her course, “Black Men & Women:  Images of Race and Gender in American Literature and Culture,” she teaches students to understand how and why black images matter.  Students analyze black masculinity and femininity in American literature, print culture and the media, first by examining stereotypical images of black people in print and non-print iconography, and then by analyzing the treatment of that stereotype in works of literature.  Check out the “Course Spotlight” below to watch a brief video of her students’ final projects.  During this off-campus public event, the class engaged in important consciousness-raising work within their local community, at Sumner Hall. You can also follow the links to a photo gallery of their 2016 poster presentations as well as her 2020 students’ digital exhibition.

Teaching Areas

• African American Literature
• The Gilded Age and American Literary Realism
• The History of the Book in America (Print Culture)
• Literature and Composition

 Course Spotlight

 

Photo Gallery: Black Men: Student Presentations on Contemporary Images

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2020 Black Men & Women Digital Student Exhibition 

Scholarship

Published Books

• Hagar's Daughter, by Pauline E. Hopkins.  Co-edited with John Gruesser.  Broadview Press, 2020.
• Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African American Writer’s (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2012.

Selected Articles

• “Transitions in African American Book Publishing and Print Culture.” African American Literature in Transition, 1900-1910, Ed. Shirley Moody-Turner.  Cambridge University Press, 2021.

• “To Be a Publisher:  Lillian Jones Horace and the Dotson –Jones Printing Company.” Recovering Five Generations Hence: The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace. Ed. Karen Kossie-Chernyshev.  College Station:  Texas A&M University Press, 2013.
• “‘To have the benefit of some special machinery’: African American Book Publishing and Bookselling, 1900-1920.” U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920. Ed. Christine Bold. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012.
• “‘All Things Work Together For Good’: Pauline Hopkins’s Race Woman and the Gospel of Success.” Loopholes and Retreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century. Ed. John Cullen Gruesser and Hanna Wallinger. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009. 125-140.
• “Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline E. Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine.” American Periodicals 17.1 (2007): 41-64.

College Service

Dr. Knight’s service to WC has included serving as the founding program director for the Black Studies minor, chairing the Service & Scholarship committee, advising Cleopatra’s Sisters, and serving on the Tenure & Promotion committee, the Honor Board, Phi Beta Kappa’s Members in Course committee, as Faculty Secretary, and as Faculty Moderator.