Kennedy Marie Crowder

Biography

Background

Kennedy Marie Crowder is a second-year PhD student at The University of Edinburgh. Her ongoing doctoral thesis, funded through the Edinburgh Doctoral College Scholarship, examines African American literature of the 20th and 21st century through the lens of Weird Fiction and Theory. 

She studied English Literature, American Sign Language, and Japanese as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving the Rittenberg Prize for Best Undergraduate Student in English and the English Department Community Award. Her MA in Black Humanities from University of Bristol and MRes in English Literature from University of York were funded through the Marshall Scholarship, in which she drew on theories from physics of Blackness scholarship to interpret nonlinear and unstable spacetimes in Black diasporic literatures.

Having served as Managing and Associate Editor for "The Penn Review" during undergrad, Kennedy continues to nurture a love of creative writing and editorial work through her role as Co-Editor of the Back of the Envelope department at "The Offing" and peer reviewing and editing for "FORUM."

Qualifications

University of York - Masters by Research in English Literature (2023-2024)

University of Bristol - Taught Masters in Black Humanities (distinction) (2022-2023)

University of Pennsylvania - BA in English Literature (summa cum laude); certificate in American Sign Language/Deaf Culture; minor in Japanese - East Asian Languages and Civilizations (2018-2022)

Responsibilities & affiliations

British Association of Modernist Studies (BAMS)

Postgraduate Research School Representative - Literatures, Languages and Cultures (2025-2026)

College Postgraduate Research Committee, student member (2025-2026)

FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & Arts, peer reviewer and editor (2025-2026)

The Back of the Envelope department at The Offing literary magazine, co-editor (2023-ongoing)

James Tait Black Prize in Fiction reader (2026)

Scottish BPOC Writers Network

Phi Beta Kappa

Research summary

Kennedy's doctoral thesis engages the following research questions. What is the impact of the lack of African American perspectives on scholars’ understanding of how the Weird develops in the United States? What would a more expansive reading of Black Weird fiction look like? And because the weird inherently invites readers to challenge their perception of reality, what ways of imagining being in space and time is lost by not considering the weirdness of African American literature more expansively? By analysing twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature, this project thus seeks to draw out the centrality of Blackness to weird fiction’s philosophical underpinnings and elucidate a Black Weird archive: the richness of its own historical development, the diversity of its authors, the generic complexity and hybridity of its prose.

Current research interests

African American and Black diasporic literature; Weird fiction and theor; the impact and influence of race on perceptions of space/time; physics of Blackness 

Papers delivered

"Weird Automata: A Necropolitic." Aliens, Automata, and Amphibia Seminar at the Modernist Studies Association/British Association for Modernist Studies 2026 Joint Annual Conference, 1-4 July 2026.

"'A little more than life was taken from them': The Figure of the Lynched Zombie in Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021)." Monster Media Conference, 17-19 June 2026.

"'A mirror of the present': Black Women’s* Contemporary Writing as Archival Call-andResponse." Countervoices - Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Forum 'Poetics of Witness' Research Seminar, 16 May 2024.

“Fabulation, Physics, and Racial Horror.” New Directions in Black Humanities Conference, 18 April 2023.

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