Rate My Professor Susana Morris

Susana M. Morris is an associate professor and associate chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in English with a Certificate in Women’s Studies from Emory University in 2007 and her B.A. in English, magna cum laude, from Mount Holyoke College in 2002. Before joining Georgia Tech in 2017 as an associate professor, she was an associate professor of English at Auburn University from 2013 to 2017 and an assistant professor there from 2007 to 2013, as well as an instructor in the Department of English at Spelman College from 2006 to 2007. Morris has held prestigious visiting positions, including Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan in Spring 2023, and Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University in Fall 2022. She served as interim associate chair in her current school from 2024 to 2025 and director of Core Literature at Auburn University from 2013 to 2017.

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.