Rate My Professor Susana Morris

A Black feminist scholar and cultural critic, Morris specializes in Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative Arts Movement, Black media studies, gender studies and Black feminist theory, race, climate change, and the Anthropocene, as well as 20th- and 21st-century African American and Caribbean literature and theory. She is the founding director of the Earthseed Project, a digital humanities initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation from 2024 to 2027. Her honors include the Faculty Excellence in Research Award from Georgia Tech in 2025, GT DILAC-A Grant Award for Earthseed: Afrofuturism and Black Livability in 2021-2022, and multiple “Thanks For Being a Great Teacher!” Awards from the Center for Teaching and Learning at Georgia Tech between 2018 and 2020. Morris is the author of Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2025) and Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2014). She co-edited The Crunk Feminist Collection (Feminist Press, 2017) and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Press, 2017), and co-authored Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood (W.W. Norton, 2021). Notable articles include “The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay” in Signs (2013) and “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling” in WSQ (2012). She is series editor for “New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative” at Ohio State University Press since 2016 and co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. Her scholarship has appeared in The Black Scholar, Signs, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and she has been featured in NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Essence.