Sonya Posmentier

Associate Professor Of English

Education

Ph.D. 2012, English, Princeton University M.F.A. 1999, Creative Writing, University of Oregon B.A. 1997, English, Yale University

External Affiliations

Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, Modernist Studies Association

Caribbean Studies Association

Fellowships/Honors

Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship, June-December 2015 First Book Institute, Center for American Literary Study, Pennsylvania State University, June 2013

William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize 

Bio

Sonya Posmentier is an associate professor in the Department of English, where she teaches African American and Black Diasporic literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and environmental literature. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and is a recipient of the William Sanders Scarborough award from the Modern Language Association. She is at work on a new book, Black Reading, about the intersecting histories of black cultural studies and modern lyric theory. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books and elsewhere, and she has published poems in Grey, Seneca Review, and Perihelion. She is a member of the Postcolonial, Race, and Diaspora Studies Working Group and of the NYU Sanctuary Coalition.

 

Publications

  • "Citizens to Come: Building Beyond the 14th Amendment."Public Books. July 2018.
  • ’The college that enters the prison is transformed’: A conversation with Daniel Karpowitz and Jessica Neptune.” Public Books. February 2018.
  • “Lyric Reading in the Black Ethnographic Archive.” American Literary History. January 2018.
  • "Sanctuary Syllabus." Public Books. December 2017 (co-authored with NYU Sanctuary Coalition)
  • Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature Johns Hopkins University Press. 2017
  • “A Language for Grieving.” The New York Times Book Review, December 21, 2015.
  • “The Slave in the Great House: ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom, Property, and the Plantation.” In Race and Real Estate, edited by Adrienne Brown and Valerie Smith, 294–312.
  • “Blueprints for Negro Reading: Sterling Brown’s Study Guides.” In A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, 119–36.
  • “The Provision Ground in New York: Claude McKay and the Form of Memory.” American Literature 84.2 (2012): 273-300.