DeLisa Hawkes

Areas of Specialization

Nineteenth to twenty-first-century African American literature, Native American and Indigenous Studies, historical fiction, speculative fiction, genealogy in literature, and cultural identity in horror and science fiction.

Background

DeLisa D. Hawkes is an Assistant Professor of English and a faculty affiliate of the American Studies Program. Her current book project examines literary representations of Indigeneity and Black and Native relationality during the New Negro Renaissance. Hawkes’s work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including J19, MELUS, Women’s Studies, Langston Hughes Review, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Studies in the Fantastic, North Carolina Literary Review, 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past (Palgrave, 2020), Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée (Fordham UP, 2023), and Down the Road and Back Again: Critical Approaches to The Golden Girls (Routledge, 2025). 

Several fellowships and grants have sponsored Hawkes’s research, including support from the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the First Book Institute hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. In 2024 and 2015, she participated in the selective NEH Summer Institutes titled “Towards a People’s History of Landscape: Black and Indigenous Histories” and “Paul Laurence Dunbar and American Literary History.” In 2024, she was honored with the Angie Warren Perkins Award for her scholarship, teaching, and service,  and in 2025 she received the Excellence in Teaching Award and the Artificial Intelligence Faculty Innovator Award at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Currently, she serves as vice president of the Pauline E. Hopkins Society and is a podcast advisory council member for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Education

Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park

M.A. North Carolina Central University

B.A. North Carolina State University