Amadi Ozier
Position title: Assistant Professor

Degrees and Institutions
- Ph.D., Literatures in English, Rutgers University, 2022
- M.A., Literatures in English, Rutgers University, 2018
- B.A., English and Creative Writing, University of West Georgia, 2013
Bio
Amadi Ozier is a scholar specializing in black American diasporic literature and performance, with a particular interest in race, humor, lynching culture, capitalism, and black cultural history.
Ozier is currently working on a book entitled Humor Among Uppity Negroes at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Black Literary Analysis. The book recovers irony as a crucial artifact of black gentile self-definition by reclaiming subtlety, wit, and other mannered rhetorical gestures as overlooked features of black bourgeois art and performance that aim to discipline public representations of blackness. Middle class black writers used a practiced sense of humor to joke about topical issues like lynching, interracial sex, and political disorganization. Ultimately, the book argues that black humorists used irony to index cultural anxieties about black representation for both intraracial and interracial readerships amid the development of an emerging black American middle class.
Their research has been generously supported by the Ford Foundation; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis; the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library; the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research; and Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honors fraternity. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Social Text, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, Early American Literature, and Oxford Handbook of African American Humor.
As a community builder with the Crown Heights C.A.R.E. Collective (which Ozier co-founded) and the Crown Heights Tenant Union in Brooklyn, NY, Ozier’s work in housing advocacy and crisis response, mutual aid, and abolitionist popular education has been funded by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Morgridge Center for Public Service. They have co-authored zines on various subjects including: police accountability, tenant rights and organization, and creative mass action.
Publications
Articles.
2024. “Lynching Modernism: Ulysses, America, and the Negro Minstrel Abroad.” Modernism/modernity. https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/ozier-lynching-modernism-ulysses-america-negro-minstrel-abroad
Book chapters.
February 2020. “Theatre and Performance in the 19th Century.” Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies.
Book reviews.
2017. “This Body Still Has Time: Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual.” Social Text. https://socialtextjournal.org/this-body-still-has-time-jermaine-singletons-cultural-melancholy-readings-of-race-impossible-mourning-and-african-american-ritual/
Other.
“How to Stage a Rally: A People’s Field Guide.” Crown Heights C.A.R.E. Collective, Brooklyn, NY, 2023.
Courses Taught
Race Science and Science Fiction (ENG 182, Honors; ENG 173; ENG 141)
Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Modernism (ENG 461; ENG 173)
Black Women Writers (“Mother + Land + Literature”) (ENG 245)
Property + Possession (ENG 829)