Jacinta Saffold is currently a visiting faculty fellow in the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. She is also an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture at the University of Delaware and a digital archivist. She researches and teaches 20th and 21st century African American literature, Hip Hop Studies, and the Digital Humanities. She is concurrently working on her first monograph, Books & Beats: The Cultural Kinship of Street Lit and Hip Hop and the Essence Book Project, a computational collection of popular African American Literature.
In 2018, she co-founded the Black Women’s Studies Association and currently serves as Treasurer. She is a member of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, a 2017-2019 Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow, a Mellon-Mays (MMUF) fellow, the inaugural winner of the Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellowship in Black critical bibliography from the Bibliographical Society of America, and an inaugural David Ruggles Young Book Collectors of Color awardee. Her research has been supported by the Louisiana Board of Regents Award to Artists and Scholars, The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), the Black Book Interactive Project Scholars program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has also served as a higher education administrator in university admission and diversity, equity & student success. Her work can be found in the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. Journal (MELUS), Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Black Perspectives, Cultural Front, and Bloomsbury’s #MeToo and Literary Studies Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture.
