Elleza Kelley

Elleza Kelley is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, and affiliate faculty in American Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and her B.A. from Wesleyan University. Kelley works on African American literature, with an emphasis on black geographies and radical spatial practice in the United States. Her current book project, Flight Lines: A Poetics of Black Space, examines how African American literature and visual art index black spatial thought and practice through experimentations with form, genre, and media. In particular, Flight Lines attends to the multivalent ways black people have engaged with U.S. geographies of racial enclosure, tracking the interface between black form and black space. Kelley’s second project theorizes mark-making, literacy, and abstraction in works byToni Morrison and John Keene. Kelley sits on the editorial board of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society and is the co-editor, with Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, of the Cambridge - University Press Element Series in Urban Literary and Cultural Studies. At Yale, Kelley teaches courses on a range of subjects including Black Geographies, American Literature, African American Studies and a course called Counternarratives, which explores contemporary black historical fiction alongside the histories and archival material it takes as inspiration. 

Selected Publications:

- Roofscapes: Narrative Geographies of Fugitive Praxis ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 22.5 (2023)

- Ordinary Allurements: Christina Sharpe’s Reading Lessons, The Yale Review 111.2 (2023)

- “Follow the Tree Flowers”: Fugitive Mapping in Beloved Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 53.1 (2021)

- No Man’s Land: The Architecture of Abolition, Cabinet Magazine (2020)

updated March 2025