Nicole Stamant’s (she/her) work takes as its primary focus historically marginalized populations and historically marginalized forms of literature: Life Writing Studies, ethnic American literatures, and the literatures of gender and sexual minorities. Most recently she is the author of Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging (Routledge 2022), which looks at a number of contemporary memoirs by African Americans–including Natasha Tretheway, Emily Raboteau, Toi Derricotte, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, Rebecca Walker, Adrian Piper, James McBride, Danzy Senna, and Barack Obama–about their experiences being light-skinned and/or biracial. Using the lenses of hospitality and hauntology, this project also incorporates auto/biographical sketches of Stamant’s own family and ancestral history and considers the implications of genetic identity and citizenship on life writing.
Other publications include Serial Memoir: Archiving American Lives (Palgrave 2014), a contribution to a special issue of English Language Notes on memory, amnesia, and commemoration (2019), and chapters in collections including Consumption and the Literary Cookbook (Routledge, 2020), American Literature in Transition: 1970-1980 (2018) and The Postcolonial Subject in Transit: Migration, Borders, and Subjectivity in African Diaspora Literature (2018). Her articles on gender, race and ethnicity, seriality, and foodways, have appeared in ARIEL, MELUS, a/b: Auto/Biography, South Central Review, The Hemingway Review, and Studies in Comics, among others; the most recent, “Can Erica Kane Write a Memoir?: How Erica Kane’s Having It All, Susan Lucci’s All My Life, and Ruth Warrick’s The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler Refashion Daytime Celebrity Memoir,” is forthcoming from South Atlantic Review. She is currently working on a manuscript about hospitality in culinary memoir.
A member of the English Department at Agnes Scott since 2011, she served as Chair of the department from 2018-2019 and 2020-2022, and the SUMMIT Faculty Coordinator for Digital in the Curriculum from 2019-2021. A member of SAMLA’s Executive Committee and the managing editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, she received Agnes Scott’s Vulcan Materials Company Teaching Excellence Award in 2018 and lives in Decatur with her husband and two children.
