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Regina Hamilton-Townsend

Research Interests:
African American Literature
African African American and Caribbean Literature and Culture
20th Century Women's Narrative
gender and race
Black Queer Studies

Regina Hamilton-Townsend is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the African American and Africana Studies Program and the Gender and Women Studies Department at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Hamilton-Townsend teaches primarily twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature, and she is the winner of both the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award (2022) and the University of Kentucky Provost Outstanding Teaching Award (2022). She received her doctorate from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in the English department, a master's degree from Georgetown University's department of English, and her bachelor's degree from Duke University in English. Her work on twentieth and twenty-first century Black speculative fiction, representations of race in video games, and the racial politics of narrative world-building in games has been published in the Journal of Games Criticism and The Black Scholar, and she has a forthcoming chapter in the edited collection She Dreams of Afrofutures: Speculative Black Girlhoods. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Afrofutures and the American Nation, in which she analyzes the speculative literary devices contemporary Black authors use to remove the American nation as an obstacle to Black futurity and freedom.