Katherine McKittrick is aprofessor in Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts. While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis on embodied, creative and intellectual spaces engendered in the diaspora.
McKittrick’s work focuses on black feminist thought,cultural geography, black studies, anti-colonial studies, and the arts. McKittrick's writing centers black life—as empirical, experiential, spatial, and analytical processes—while also drawing attention to how black creative texts are expressive of anti-colonial politics. These themes are addressed in her books Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. and Dear Science and Other Stories as well as her edited collection and contributions to the book Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. McKittrick also edited, with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Her research explored the works of Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, Jimi Hendrix, Drexciya, Édouard Glissant, and Dionne Brand.
Edited with Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto: Between the Lines Press & Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007.
Articles
Katherine McKittrick, Frances H. O'Shaunghnessy, Kendall Witaszek, "Rhythm, or On Sylvia Wynter's Science of the Word," American Quarterly, 70:4 : 867-874.
Katherine McKittrick and Alexander G. Weheliye, “808s & Heartbreak,” Propter Nos, 2:1, : 13-42.
Katherine McKittrick, "Fantastic Still Life: On Richard Iton ", in Contemporary Political Theory : 24–32.
"Plantation Futures", Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, 3 42 : 1–15.
"On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place", Journal of Social and Cultural Geography, 12:8 : 947–963.
"Science Quarrels Sculpture: The Politics of Reading Sarah Baartman", Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature—A Special Issue: Sculpture, 43:2 : 113–130.
In conversation with Carole Boyce Davies, "Intellectual Life: Carole Boyce Davies’s Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones", MaComere: The Journal of the Association of Caribbean Writers and Scholars : 27–42.
"I Entered the Lists…Diaspora Catalogues: The List, The Unbearable Territory, and Tormented Chronologies—Three Narratives and a Weltanschauung", XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, 17 : 7–29.
"Their Blood is There, and They Can’t Throw it Out': Honouring Black Canadian Geographies", Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 : 27–37.
"'Who Do You Talk To, When a Body’s in Trouble?': M. Nourbese Philip’s UnSilencing of Black Bodies in the Diaspora", Social and Cultural Geography, 1:2 : 223–236.
"'Black and ‘Cause I’m Black I'm Blue': Transverse Racial Geographies in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye", Gender, Place and Culture, 7:2 : 125–142.
Book chapters
"Yours in the Intellectual Struggle", in Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015: 1–8.
Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, To Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations," in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015: 9–89.
Katherine McKittrick. "Axis: Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the Promise of Science" in Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015: 142–163.
With Clyde Woods, "Introduction: No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of The Ocean", in Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto: Between the Lines Press; Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007: 1–13.
"Freedom is a Secret: The Future Usability of the Underground", in McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto: Between the Lines Press; Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007: 97–111.
"Dancing with Audre Lorde: Positive Obsession, Knowledge, and Some Explosions Inspired by Cathie Dunsford’s The Journey Home/Te Haerenga Kainga", in Karin Meissenberg, Talkstory—The Art of Listening: Indigenous Poetics and Politics in the Work of Cathie Dunsford. Germany: Global Dialogues Press, 2007: 88–104.
