Venetria K. Patton PhD
Dr. Venetria K. Patton is Director of African American Studies and Research Center and Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of La Verne and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of California-Riverside.
Dr. Patton is the author of The Grasp That Reaches Beyond the Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Women’s Texts (SUNY, 2013) and Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction (SUNY, 2000), the Co-editor of Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (Rutgers, 2001) and editor of Background Readings for Teachers of American Literature (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006).
She is currently editing a second edition of Background Readings for Teachers of American Literature. Her essays have appeared in Black Studies and Women’s Studies journals as well as the essay collections Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers From Africa, the Caribbean, and the US (Africa World Press, 2003), White Scholars/African American Texts (Rutgers UP, 2005) and Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Her research and teaching focus on African American and Diasporic Women’s Literature.
