Martha Pitts
Martha Pitts is an assistant professor who teaches African American literature and studies how 19th-century Black women writers used their work to document labor, challenge official histories, and reimagine what citizenship could look like. She also writes creative nonfiction about motherhood, class, family, and how illness and disability shape our relationships to place and community. Her work explores how race and space intersect--who gets to belong where, and how bodies move through different environments. Outside the classroom, Martha is a certified yoga instructor and once worked as a doula helping families during childbirth.
Education
- Ph.D., Louisiana State University
- M.A., George Mason
- A.B., Princeton University
Academic Expertise
My research focuses on how 19th-century Black women writers and contemporary illness/disability memoirists have documented their experiences in ways that challenged dominant narratives about bodies, labor, family, and citizenship. I'm drawn to students who want to explore how literature serves as resistance, how first-person accounts of illness or disability reshape public understanding, or how creative nonfiction can bridge academic and community work. Whether you're interested in Black women's writing, disability studies, illness narratives, or projects that combine scholarship with creative practice, I'd love to discuss how these interests might shape a capstone or internship.
Additional Information
Assistant Professor, Fairleigh Dickinson
Lecturer, Towson, Georgetown, Howard Universities
2017 “Uses of My Anger: Negotiating Mothering, Feminism, and Graduate School.” In Staging Women’s Lives in Academia. Eds. Michelle Massé and Nan Bauer-Maglin. SUNY Press.
2016 “Happy-To-Be-Nappy Barbie.” In Composing to Communicate: A Student’s Guide. Ed. Robert Saba. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
2014 “Nineteenth-Century Motherwork: Ideology, Experience, and Agency in Autobiographies by Black Women.” In Patricia Hill Collins: Reconceiving Motherhood. Ed. Kaila Story. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.
2021 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship (competitive, with stipend), “The New Deal Era’s Federal Writers’ Project History, Politics, and Legacy”
2011 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship (competitive, with stipend), “The Role of Place in African American Biography”