Kristen "Kay" R. Barrett

I study Black American and Black Diasporic literature and media from the 19th century to the present. My current research focuses on how Black women and nonbinary artists reinvent sci-fi, horror, and fantasy genres to represent our lived dystopian reality. Through Black feminist theoretical and aesthetic frameworks, my work analyzes how these artists reckon with body, space, and time to reinterpret master narratives of history, deconstruct the systems of oppression defining our present, and imagine liberated Black femme and queer futures.

My recent publication in Studies in the Novel, “Mythologies Uplifted: The New Woman of the Margins in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy,” reflects my early training in 19th century literature and longstanding interest in how Black women upend White-constructed representations of race, gender, and sexuality. Using Hortense Spillers’s concept of the counter-myth, I explore how Grand and Harper play with familiar narrative conventions—the mistaken identity plot and the tragic mulatta trope—to respectively imagine queer, anti-imperial, and Black New Woman figures.

Currently, I am a doctoral candidate in the English Department of Stanford University, funded by the Knight-Hennessy Global Leadership Fellowship. As a former Marshall Scholar, I also hold an MSt in English Literature (1830–1914) from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Intermediality: Literature, Film and the Arts in Dialogue from the University of Edinburgh.