Overview
Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research, broadly speaking, is concerned with the interrelation of poetry and politics, post-1960s literary history, theories of world literature, the digital humanities, and comparative Black studies. She draws upon close readings, archival materials, and digital network modeling and mapping to enthuse her research. Ama Bemma is completing a dissertation, entitled “Literary Intimacies: The Politics and Poetics of Global Anglophone Poetry,” which engages with a network of Afro-diasporic poets from the intertwined moments of the Cold War and decolonization to the present day, arguing for a reinterpretation of poetic practice as mediated through distinct forms of contact, community, and institutional support that emerged beyond and alongside the shifting national and regional borders of the period.
Ama Bemma’s writing and reviews on contemporary poetry, Afro-diasporic literature and culture, and the digital humanities are published or forthcoming from Modernism/Modernity Print+, Comparative Literature Studies, and The Black Scholar.
Ama Bemma has been a Digital Humanities Fellow (2019), the director and founder of the Global Poetics Project (2019-present), the co-founder of the Comparative Black Studies Working Group, and a founding member of the “Framing the Global: Systems, Networks, Worlding, And Globalization” reading group.
Research Focus
- Poetry and Poetics
- Comparative Black Studies / Global Black Studies
- Theories of World Literature
- Post-1960s Literary History
- Digital Humanities