Karin Wimbley’s teaching and research interests have two interrelated trajectories: one explores black cultural production, in both African American and Black Diaspora contexts, with particular attention paid to the ways we can understand black aesthetic traditions. The second trajectory investigates the politics of representation, and how we can understand American fine arts, literature, film, and visual culture canons as in dialogue with one another. Wimbley is specifically interested in the politics of representation as it connects with self-identification and representation, particularly across race, sexuality, gender, and class lines. Her courses are regularly cross-listed with Africana Studies, Film Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs.
In her current book project, Queering Anti-Blackness: Stereotypy, Representational Politics, and Black Cultural Production, Dr. Wimbley coins the term ‘stereotypy’ to describe the deployment of anti-black stereotypes in African American arts and letters to emphasize and critique the pervasive legacy of anti-blackness in the American cultural imagination. By queering and reorientating the anti-black stereotype, black artists and intellectuals employ stereotypy as a rhetorical, political, and aesthetic practice that short-circuits the claim that blackness is a wholly knowable, legible phenomenon or subject position.
In recognition of her transformative teaching and mentoring excellence, Dr. Wimbley was awarded »¨¼¾´«Ã½’s United Methodist Exemplary Teaching Award in 2021 and holds the Alfred and Kathleen Evens Faculty Fellowship.
Dr. Wimbley received her BA in Theater from Hamilton College, and earned her MA in Humanities and her MA and PhD in English from the University of Chicago.
Courses Regularly Taught
African American Literature Ethics and SocietyLiteratures of the Black Diaspora African American Cinema New York Auteurs: Martin Scorsese & Spike LeeTraversing Boundaries in the Graphic NovelU.S. Women’s Autobiography(re)Imagining Black MasculinitiesGendered Nationalism in South African Literature & Film