Dr. Kendra R. Parker is an assistant professor in the Department of English.

Areas of Expertise

Dr. Kendra R. Parker specializes in African American literature, with interests in authors Octavia E. Butler, L.A. Banks and Tananarive Due. Her research centers on black female vampires in African American women’s novels and in American film.

EDUCATION

• Ph.D., 2014, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
• B.A., 2008, University of West Georgia

Selected publications

• Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977-2011: She Bites Back, Lexington Press, 2018
• "Soucouyants, Ol'Hige, and Lougarou, Oh My!: Shedding Skin, Breaching Boundaries, and Creating Change," review of The Things That Fly in the Night," PLL Journal, 2018
• “Decolonizing the University: A Battle for the African Mind” (Introduction), CLA Journal, 2016
• “Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism,” 20th and 21st Centuries in American Literature, ed. Mary Pat Brady, Gale Researcher, 2016
• “Unchaining Selves: Contemporary Slavery and Health Care Freedom in Tananarive Due’s Blood Colony,” CLA Journal 59.2, December 2015
• Review of Gregory Jerome Hampton’s Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires, 2012