Her first book, Who’s Laughing Now?: Black Satire and the Aesthetics of Decipherment (in progress), offers the first sustained account of Black experimental satire in the post-integration era, tracing how writers from William Melvin Kelley to Percival Everett reimagine the possibilities of literary form, interpretation, and cultural authority. She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) and a special issue of African American Review on African American literature and the other arts.
Dr. Edmonds’s work appears in American Literary History, MELUS, Post45:Contemporaries, and numerous edited collections. Her scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW–Madison.
At UW–Madison, Dr. Edmonds teaches courses on African American literature, Black satire, race and performance, and the politics of literary form. In 2021-2022 AY, she served as faculty advisor for the Great World Texts program focused on James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and she is part of the research team that received the inaugural $50,000 seed grant from the Paul Martin Wolff Center. She also serves on the executive boards of several scholarly organizations in her fields, contributing to the advancement of African American literary studies, humor studies, and cultural criticism. Dr. Edmonds received her Ph.D in English from Princeton University.
For more information about her work, visit: brittneymichelleedmonds.com
