Corrine Collins

African diaspora literature

Corrine Collins’ research focuses on interracial sociality and sexuality in 20^th and 21^st century African diaspora literature and popular culture. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Public Books, Air/Light Magazine, and Mixed-Race Superheroes (Rutgers UP, 2021). She teaches classes on Black British literature, Caribbean literature, multiraciality, and African Diaspora foodways.

Her book-in-progress Injurious Love: Interracial Intimacy and the Post-Racial Future (working title) examines the racialization of familial and social love in interracial families and friendships. By reading tropes of violence in African diaspora women’s writing, her book challenges the multiracial home as a space of presumed racial harmony, and asks us to theorize new modes of intimacy that account for, rather than deny, asymmetries of power in interracial spaces. Collins is also at work on a second book project which examines British culinary nationalism and the emergence of “native” British cuisine and “foreign” food. She argues that an ideal of British culinary restraint develops to mitigate anxieties of eroding cultural superiority, and examines food culture as site of belonging/exclusion for Black Britons.

Before coming to USC, Collins received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Northwestern University, and held a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship at Carleton College. She is from Birmingham, England, and is the first university graduate in her family.

• Ph.D. English, Northwestern University, 2019
• M.A. English, Northwestern University, 2014
• M.A. English, Brigham Young University, 2013
• B.A. Comparative Literature, Brigham Young University, 2010