A Black Feminist Genealogy of the Monstrous Mulatta: Pre and Post Emancipation

Haylee Christine Harrell (she/they) is a Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Associate in African American and African Diaspora Literary Studies in the English Department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. They received their Ph.D. in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University in 2021 and their research was funded by the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference during the 2020-2021 academic year.

Their current book project, Feeling Akin: A Genealogy of the Mulatta as a Ghost of the Color Line traces how the ghostly concept of the mulatta haunts- and disciplines-black women in our historical present. Dr. Harrell's research is a black feminist intervention into critical black studies and critical mixed- raced-studies. Bridging the divisions between lived experience and academia, between everyday comments ("what are you?," "but you don't act black") and scholarly sites like Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Harrell contends that a violent history of forced racial intermixture has produced blackness as a condition that is always already mixed.