If I could say anything about myself as a writer, it’s that I write for the story. But there is no story worth telling that doesn’t have some gem of honest truth at its core – and it is usually a truth that unsettles. My craft as a writer is to bring my readers to difficult truths; to have them stay in that uncomfortable place; and to love on them with prose while I bring them to it.

I’ve spent much of my writerly career as an academic. At a presentation during Duke’s Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute (2022), a graduate student asked me if I considered myself to be a feminist philosopher. While I often eschew categories, I had to agree that my work always endeavors to discover new approaches to a particular question – and many of those questions are philosophical ones that engage a world beyond the material one we can easily assess. 

My scholarly writing is highly interdisciplinary and often eclectic, with intellectual engagements across the fields of critical race/ethnic, Black, feminist, and queer studies. During my over thirty years in the profession, I have given talks both internationally and domestically and focused upon bringing communities together, helping them to suture initiatives among diverse and often contentious intellectual traditions. My research profile also includes the creation of community-based initiatives. I remain engaged and invigorated by undergraduate and graduate research and do not feel that teaching somehow detracts from my research agenda. At each and every iteration of my institutional homes, I have been an active member on the ground, producing new avenues for interdisciplinary research, stretching my own previously held conceptions of what might be possible in intellectual community, and establishing concrete programs, curriculums and institutional spaces for interdisciplinary collaboration and creative innovation for faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate). 

If you would like access to a curriculum vitae, please email me at spH@sharonpholland.com

Single-Authored Books: 

Raising the Dead: Death and Black Subjectivity (2000), 

The Erotic Life of Racism (2012), 

an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (2023)

Co-Authored Books: 

Tiya Miles & Sharon P. Holland, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (2006)

The Erotic Life of Racism

“My goal in these pages has been to create an alternative genealogy for how the erotic became uncoupled from the arc of racism’s reach. With this trajectory in mind, I now turn to queer critical attempts to bring race and racism back to the table of queer ideas. In the next chapter, I focus on the discretionary claims of queer criticism’s interdisciplinarity while simultaneously holding a brief for the loss and forgetting and unrecoverability of black.female.queer presence in the making of such critical interventions.”