Rate My Professor Sherry Johnson

Dr. Sherry Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Grand Valley State University, where she also serves as Director of the Masters of Arts Program in English. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, B.A. Honors and B.Ed. from York University, and Teaching Certification from the Ontario College of Teachers. As a literary historian, Johnson researches and writes about Black writing between Canada and the United States that engages memory and history, particularly at the intersection of Black women’s lives and their writing, African American visual culture, and the digital humanities. She is faculty in Africana Studies with areas of interest including 19th- and 20th-century African-American literature, neo-slave narratives, diasporic Black women’s writing, 19th- and 20th-century African-American visual culture, multicultural literature, and rhetoric of multiculturalism. Her courses include ENG 216 Foundations of Literary Study: Critical Approaches, ENG 231 Early African American Literature, ENG 232 Modern African American Literature, ENG 335 Literature of American Minorities, ENG 337 Black Contemporary Literature, ENG 440 Studies in Major Authors, and ENG 495 Language and Literature Capstone.

Johnson's research is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, the Mellon Foundation, the Slavery North Institute, and the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is Vice-President and Program Chair for MELUS, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and former chair of its Women of Color Caucus. Key publications include the monograph Reading Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Canada and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (Publishing Without Walls, 2026); forthcoming Companion to Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (McFarland Publishing, 2027) and Porous Borders: Contours of Black Writing Between Canada and the USA (in editing/review); book chapters “Resisting Black-Lack Readings of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison (Modern Language Association of America, 2024) and “Self-care and Sanctuary in Black Women’s Salons” in Trauma, Tresses and Truth (Chicago Review Press, 2022); the essay “Self-Revision as Praxis” in Black Perspectives (2022); and book reviews of Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic in Early American Literature (2025) and Geographies of African American Short Fiction in Resources for American Literary Study (2022). In 2026, she received a service award from Grand Valley State University.