Education

PhD, University of Notre Dame, 2001
MA, University of Notre Dame, 1998
BA, Mills College, Oakland, CA, 1995, Summa cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa
AA, Laney College, Oakland, CA, 1993, Summa cum Laude

Specialization

Langley specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American and American literature and theory. Her courses include such topics as early black narrative forms (conversion, captivity, slave narration, travel, and spiritual autobiography), eighteenth-century Afro-British American poetics, and nineteenth-century black women writers. Her interdisciplinary research integrates African Diaspora literature, African, American and African American Studies, and Black Feminist/Womanist theory and criticism. She has published articles in The Western Journal of Black Studies, a/b: Autobiography Studies, bma/Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, as well as review essays for Legacy and Early American Literature. Her book, The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Self and Identity in Eighteenth-Century African American Literature (Ohio State University Press), explores the culturally specific African origins of the eighteenth-century Afro-British American literary and cultural self through a conceptualization of the dilemma posed by competing African, American, and British cultural identities. Additional book projects include Looking for Phillis, an in-depth study on the Senegambian poetics and oral traditions that influence the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. She is also a Phi Beta Kappa member, 2001 AAUW fellow, and a 2003-2005 Postdoctoral Fellow in African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.