Leah Milne, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Multicultural American Literature at the University of Indianapolis. Her work focuses on contemporary ethnic American literatures, especially African American and Asian American literature. She also studies the fields of postcolonial theory and women's & gender studies.
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She teaches courses such as American Literature, African American literature, postcolonial literature, multicultural literature, and interdisciplinary courses, including a course on intertextuality and identity in Beyonce's Lemonade. She and her colleagues enjoy geeking out about books on their lunch breaks or, when the opportunity allows, in more formal circumstances.
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She is currently working on a book project that examines self-care, ethnic identity, and acts of authorship in post-1989 multicultural American novels. This book shows how novelists such as Toni Morrison, Gina Apostol, Carmen Maria Machado, Percival Everett, and Ruth Ozeki mobilize self-conscious fiction (or metafiction) to underscore the limitations of existing multicultural frameworks, thus providing a foundation for self-care. By featuring circular storytelling, writers as characters, revisions, and other self-referential techniques, these authors present a dynamic understanding of ethnicity that is simultaneously more global and intimate, encompassing multiple intertwined histories and customs and drawing attention to identities and ways of being left out of the multicultural framework.
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To see a video of her speaking with some awesome people at Purdue University about Black Panther, Afrofuturism, and more, click here or below.
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She manages the UIndy English department Twitter account, which can be accessed here. For less department-related (and more cat-related) posts, you can follow her personal Twitter account @DrMLovesLit.
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She received her doctorate in American literature from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, NC.
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Leah gave an interview on the Signal Boosting podcast mini-series from Ideas on Fire, the Association of Asian American Studies, and the Smithsonian Asian American Pacific Center. To hear the interview, click here or the image below.
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You can also hear her kick off the opening of one of her favorite podcasts, NPR's Code Switch, here. Speaking of favorites, for a list of some of the books she loves most, click here. For more information on Leah's teaching and research, click the links in the menu, or e-mail her.
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E-mail: milnel [at] uindy [dot] edu
