Daphne Lamothe is a literary and cultural studies scholar at Smith College, where she is Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her primary affiliation at Duke will be in History, where she will continue her research on migration, Afro-pessimism and black optimism.
 
During her fellowship, Professor Lamothe will work on two projects. The first is a book project, entitled Blackness, Being and Event, in which she examines post-soul narratives that use immigrant urbanity to frame their explorations of millennial blackness. For the second project, she will collaborate with Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith to use the mission of the journal, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism as a catalyst for building Smith-Duke partnerships in teaching, co-curricular planning, and research. Professor Lamothe serves on the Executive Advisory Board of Meridians, an interdisciplinary forum for scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in U.S. and international contexts.
 
Professor Lamothe earned her B.A. in English from Yale University, and her Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley. She is the author of Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography, as well as peer-reviewed essays and articles that consider questions of national belonging, cultural identity, and symbolic geographies within the Black Atlantic imagination.