USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Biographical Sketch

Olanna Mills received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California. She is currently working on a second major research project. "Rethinking the Classical Tradition: The Place of Antiquity in African American Literature" is a comparative study of the ways in which cultural and literary models from ancient Greece and Rome both implicitly and explicitly operate as a vehicle in African American texts to shape, reform, and make sense of the construction of racial categories in the United States. It reflects her broader scholarly interests in the current state and future prospects of Classica Africana. The project includes the exploration of previous scholarship beginning with Michele Valerie Ronnick's notions of Classica Africana, which carefully delineates the achievements of African American scholars of Classics in the United States from the late eighteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century, but moves through the terrain of African American Classicism in order to explore the appropriation of certain motifs from ancient Greek and Latin texts in ways that resist, challenge, and in some cases radically transform notions of personhood within a racially stratified society. The writings of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove represent the richness of the classical experience within African American literary works and invite further discussion as to how the discipline of Classics has itself transformed the African American experience during the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-centuries.

Education

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