Conseula Francis is professor of English and Associate Provost for Curriculum and Institutional Resources at the College of Charleston. From 2007-2015, she also served as director of the African American Studies Program. She specializes in contemporary African American literature, especially the novel, black intellectual thought, blackness in contemporary culture, and African American science fiction and comics. Specifically, she studies the function of literature in black intellectual thought, i.e. how does African American literature assist in answering questions about issues such as race, difference, and integration that have been topics of debate amongst black intellectuals, especially in the twentieth century; and the reception and perception of blackness in the popular media, i.e. how do the books we read, the movies we watch, and the art we produce shape and challenge our perceptions of black people and black identity.  Her publications include The Critical Reception of James Baldwin: An Honest Man and a Good Writer (from Camden House Press), Conversations with Octavia Butler (from University Press of Mississippi), “Kyle Baker’s Slave Narrative” in Comics and the U.S. South, and “(Re)Making a Difference: The Harlem Renaissance and the Anxiety of 1926” in The Langston Hughes Review. Her latest essay is “American Truths: Blackness and the American Superhero” in The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. She is currently researching contemporary African American popular romance and erotica.