Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Women's and Gender Studies Department. Her scholarship and teaching always emerges at the axis of Africana Studies, Comics Studies, and Southern Studies, with a focus on race, spacetime, narrative, gender and sexuality, and nationality.

She is co-editor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge, 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (U of Mississippi P, forthcoming 2022), and BOOM! Splat: Comics and Violence (U of Mississippi P, under contract). She is currently at work on her first monograph entitled Black and Immigrant: Diaspora, Belonging, and Time in American Literature after 1965, a critical exploration of representations of immigrants of African descent to the U.S. from Afropolitans to Wakandan Americans. Her scholarly work appears or is forthcoming in south: a scholarly journal, Mississippi Quarterly, The Cambridge Companion to New Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2022), The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel (Cambridge UP, under contract), A History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge UP, 2021), and Small Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU P, 2017), among other places. Her work on comics has appeared in The Comics Journal, Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults (U of Mississippi P, 2017), and The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (U of Mississippi P 2010). Her areas of teaching and research include Africana Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Literary Theory, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comics Studies, Southern Studies, and 20th and 21st century U.S. Literary Studies. She is currently serving as Member at Large for the William Faulkner Society, the Second Vice President of the Comics Studies Society, on the MLA Executive Committee for LLC Southern Studies, and on the Executive Board of Women's and Gender Studies at UNT. Before joining UNT, she spent nine years at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She lives in Denton with her partner, son, and three naughty cats.