Terrion L Williamson

Terrion Williamson is an assistant professor of African American and African Studies with appointments in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and American Studies. Her research and teaching specializations include black feminist theory, twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature, black cultural studies, media studies, and racialized gender violence. Her first book, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, uses her experiences growing up in the small midwestern city of Peoria, Illinois as the staging ground for a study of how poor and working-class black women upend foregoing notions of black female representation and consequently circumvent the constraints of stereotype discourse in the making of alternative black communal formations and kinship networks. Her current book project, which builds upon work started in the last chapter of Scandalize My Name, is a victim-centered study of the more than 60 cases throughout the U.S. in which black women have been the sole or primary targets of serial killers since the 1970s.