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Marika Ceschia is an early-career researcher in American studies specializing in African American and Black diasporic literatures and cultures. She is the author of Otherworldly Mothering: The Maternal Grammar of Black Women’s Writing, 1970–1990 (Louisiana State University Press, 2024), a monograph that reimagines mothering as a critical lens for reading Black women’s writing. Her current book project, Insurgent Ecologies, develops a Black maternal ecocritical framework to challenge dominant traditions of nature writing. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as SPELL, Green Letters, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Alongside her research, she has extensive teaching experience in English and American literature, with expertise in African American narrative and decolonial literary studies.
RCC Research Project: From Grammar to Sovereignty: The Environmental Praxis of Black Women’s Literature
Selected Publications:
- “Towards a Black Maternal Praxis of Signification.” In “American Futurisms,” ed. Deborah Madsen. Special issue, SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, no. 46 (2025).
- Otherworldly Mothering: The Maternal Grammar of Black Women’s Writing. Louisiana State University Press, 2024.
- “Willa’s Maternal Ethics of Care in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills.” U.S. Studies Online (blog), 3 March 2022. https://usso.uk/2022/03/03/willas-maternal-ethics-of-care-in-gloria-naylors-linden-hills/.