Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell, PhD (she/her + Koritha rhymes with Aretha) is an award-winning author, literary historian, cultural critic, and professional development expert. Her research focuses on African American literature as well as violence in United States history and contemporary culture. She examines how texts, both written and performed, help targeted families and communities survive and thrive.

Her first book, Living with Lynching, won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her second monograph, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, appeared in August 2020, was named a Best Book of 2020 by Ms. Magazine and Black Perspectives, and became a CHOICE Academic Title in 2021. She has edited Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, as well as Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy. Her scholarly articles include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” published by American Quarterly, and “Love in Action,” which appeared in Callaloo and identifies similarities between lynching and violence against LGBTQ communities.

What lynching and anti-LGBT violence most have in common is the targeted group’s success. To emphasize that members of marginalized groups are attacked for their success, not because they have done something wrong, Koritha coined the term “know-your-place-aggression,” and it has shaped public conversations and academic discourse. Public examples include Good Morning America, FiveThirtyEight, NPR’s Morning Edition, and The Guardian, and academic examples span the social sciences, the physical and computer sciences as well as the humanities.

Koritha’s own public commentary has addressed a range of issues, and it is always oriented toward justice and informed by Black feminism. Her commentary has appeared in outlets such as Time, The Washington Post, CNN, Openly, Electric Literature, and The Huffington Post. In October 2023, she received a Progressive Women’s Voices IMPACT Award from the Women’s Media Center.

As a professional development consultant, Koritha has been invited to offer guidance to professionals at every stage of their careers by various types of institutions, including the Ford Foundation Fellows Program, the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the New Jersey Department of Education, Vanderbilt University, Michigan State University, the College of Wooster, Princeton University, and the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools (NJAIS). In addition to serving as external reviewer for journal articles, book manuscripts, and tenure/promotion dossiers, she has chaired committees to select the winners of fellowships, essay awards, and book awards. In March 2014, Koritha spoke at the Library of Congress and received a Certificate of Congressional Recognition. The lecture aired on C-Span’s BookTV and is part of their online video library. In 2018, she was named Undergraduate Professor of the Year by Ohio State University’s English Undergraduate Organization.

As the first in her family to graduate from college, Koritha understands that the knowledge needed to succeed in various environments may seem like common sense, but it is anything but natural and self-evident. She therefore enjoys equipping audiences with information that will demystify the challenges they encounter. Likewise, having devoted decades to studying violence, Koritha understands the different forms it can take. Discursive violence may be bloodless, but it is incredibly destructive. She therefore enjoys equipping audiences to see how, when institutions and cultures have been designed for injustice and ​inequity, violence is built into what is most commonly said and done—no explicitly aggressive action needed.

After 18 years in the English Department at Ohio State University, Koritha is a Professor of English at Boston University. She grew up in Sugar Land, Texas (near Houston); earned her BA from Ohio Wesleyan University; and earned her MA and PhD at the University of Maryland-College Park.

In 2011, Koritha founded the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of Black Girls RUN!, a national organization encouraging women to make fitness and healthy living a priority. She stepped down from leadership in 2014 and remains proud that the chapter is still going strong. Online, she’s @ProfKori.