Dr. Kemeshia Randle-Swanson to speak at Swain Speaker Series

On March 6, the Martha Swain Speaker Series and the Ina E. Gordy Honors College welcome Dr. Kemeshia Randle Swanson, Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Mississippi State University, to campus to explore respectability politics and how it has been challenged by the “maverick feminism” of African American authors, from Zora Neale Hurston to Jesmyn Ward. Dr. Shahara’Tova Dente, associate professor of English and women’s studies and the graduate director of women’s leadership, helped select Dr. Swanson for this year’s Swain lecture. She notes that “Dr. Swanson is fierce and a rising scholar in our field. Her work highlights the Black Female experience and all its beautiful nuances in Hip-Hop culture, literature, and in the South.”

Dr. Swanson focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, southern literature, gender and sexualities studies, and hip-hop and popular culture. She is the award-winning author of Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability, published by University Press of Mississippi in 2024.

Kemeshia coined the term maverick feminist and especially enjoys reading, writing about, and teaching the works of resilient African American authors, Black women in particular, who reject respectability politics and practice their humanity unapologetically. As such, her upcoming projects turn a careful eye towards race, sexuality, class, intimacy, and activism in the works of two-time National Book Award winner and Mississippi native Jesmyn Ward. Kemeshia recently sat down with Jesmyn to discuss the restorative power of literature and the need to develop community, both personal and artistic, in order to grow and succeed in the writing world. Her edited collection, Conversations with Jesmyn Ward, will be published in September 2025, and a manuscript of literary criticism tentatively titled Love and War: Intimacy and Activism in the Works of Jesmyn Ward, is expected 2026.”

The Swain Series brings a distinguished person to campus to speak every March as part of Women’s History Month and features issues important to women’s interests, lives, and experiences. The series was established to honor the career of Dr. Martha Swain, a women’s historian who published widely on women’s lives and politics in Mississippi, including the biography Lucy Somerville Howorth: New Deal Lawyer, Politician, and Feminist from the South and edited the two-volume set Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.

MARCH 6, 2025
6-7 PM Lecture in Nissan Auditorium