Katherine McKittrick facts for kids

Katherine McKittrick is a Canadian professor and academic, writer, and editor. She is a professor in Gender studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art). While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis on embodied, creative and intellectual spaces engendered in the diaspora.

Biography

McKittrick has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University; she received her degree in 2004. She is a fellow of Royal Society of Canada (College) and a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Since 2005, she has been Professor in Gender studies at Queen's University, with joint appointments in Cultural Studies and Geography. She is former Editor at Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.

Academic work

McKittrick’s work focuses on black feminist thought, cultural geography, black studies, anti-colonial studies, and the arts. McKittrick's writing centers black life—as empirical, experiential, spatial, and analytical processes—while also drawing attention to how black creative texts are expressive of anti-colonial politics. These themes are addressed in her books Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006). and Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) as well as her edited collection and contributions to the book Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2013). McKittrick also edited, with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007). Her research explores the works of Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, Jimi Hendrix, Drexciya, Édouard Glissant, and Dionne Brand.