Arabella Katz

Combined department: Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 

B. A. Wesleyan University, English, African American Studies, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 

Arabella Katz is a first-year Ph. D. student in the African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies departments at Yale University. Her research focuses on black feminist poetics as a particular form of liberatory praxis under the confines of racial and gender difference. Her B. A. thesis focused on the poetics of Phillis Wheatley-Peters and Zora Neale Hurston to explore the ways they subverted efforts by the literary world to silence and censor them through poetics and vernacular rhetoric. At Yale, Arabella hopes to expand her thinking about black women’s poetics as a practice specific to the lives and letters of black women, focusing particularly on the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 1980s in the United States.