Danielle Stephenson

Email: 
danielle.stephenson@berkeley.edu
Office Hours: 
Tuesdays and Thursdays 10-11am, and by appointment
Languages: 
English, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese
Periods: 
20th and 21st centuries
Academic Area: 
Black Diaspora Studies

Research Areas

Modern U.S., Italian, Latin American, French and Francophone, and Lusophone Literature and Culture; Critical theory; Abolitionist traditions; Affect theory; Jazz Studies; Renaissance Humanism; Afrofuturism; Black Surrealism; Histories of Enslavement and Colonialism; Embodiment and Sensuality; Black Feminist Poethics

Biography

Danielle Stephenson is a writer, musician, and third-year PhD student in Comparative Literature, specializing in twentieth-century literature, music, and critical theory of the Black diaspora. Working with texts and media in English, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese, her writing asks questions of abolition and solidarity, with interests in surrealism, Afrofuturism, affect theory, the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition, and the construction of race as it relates to Renaissance humanism.

She obtained her B.A. in French and Italian with a concentration in Jazz Studies at Princeton University in 2020 and joined Berkeley’s Comparative Literature Department in the fall of 2021.