Amanda Anderson is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at Wesleyan University. She earned her Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and her B.A. (Hons) in African and African American Studies and in Psychology from Brandeis University. Her current book project, Is My Blackness Getting on You examines the political appeal to empathy as a mode of racial repair. In her work, she turns to 20-21st century African American literary, visual, and theatrical texts to trace the forms of these appeals and posits what she terms ‘porousness,' as an alternative framework of communal reckoning. Her research argues that porousness, in its attentiveness to the relationship between mutuality and power registers black psychic lives following legacies of racial slavery and black people’s ongoing and particular vulnerability to multiple forms of gendered and sexualized harm. Anderson is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Laney Graduate School at Emory University. She has published work on black feminist pedagogy in Feminist Formations.