Stephanie Li's research focuses on the ways in which issues of race, class, gender and sexuality influence conceptions of freedom. Her forthcoming book from SUNY Press, "Something Akin to Freedom": The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women, which won the First Book Prize in African American Studies, examines how the decision to remain enslaved represents alternative forms of agency which include the protection of personal relationships and the development of community bonds. This analysis not only introduces reproduction, mother-child relationships, and community into discourses concerning resistance, but it also expands individual liberation to include the courage to express personal desire and the freedom to love. Li proposes that black women operate upon “intra-independence,” a form of freedom that works through and within relationships rather than upon the valorization of individual achievements. Li is also working on a short biography of Toni Morrison to be published in 2010 and is co-editing a special issue of American Literary History on the political memoir.
"Something Akin to Freedom": The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women, SUNY Press 2009
“Gardening, Mothering and Storytelling in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Garden in the Dunes,” in Studies in American Indian Literature 21.1 (spring 2009)
“Becoming Her Mother’s Mother: Recreating Home and the Self in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,” in Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marie Drews and Verena Theile, Cambridge Scholars Press 2009, 156-75 [in press]
“‘Sometimes things disappear’: Absence and Mutability in Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York,” in Literature after 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, Routledge 2008, 82-98
“Racial Alliances in a White Neo-Slave Narrative: Susan Straight’s A Million Nightingales,” in Revisiting Slave Narratives II, ed. Judith Misrahi-Barak, Les Carnets du Cerpac 2007, 249-73
“Resistance, Silence, and Plaçees: Bon’s Octoroon Mistress and Louisa Picquet,” in American Literature 79:1 (march 2007), 85-112
“Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” in Callaloo 29:1 (winter 2006), 131-50
Professor Li teaches classes primarily in 19th- and 20th-century American literature as well as creative writing.
