Dr. Leah Abuan Milne is an Associate Professor of English who teaches multicultural American literature and postcolonial literature at the University of Indianapolis (UIndy). Her work focuses on contemporary ethnic American literature, especially African American and Asian American literature, as well as postcolonial literature & theory and women’s & gender studies.
Her book, Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives (University of Iowa Press), won the 2021 Midwest Modern Language Association Book Award. Novel Subjects examines self-care, ethnic identity, and acts of authorship in multicultural American novels written by authors such as Toni Morrison, Gina Apostol, Carmen Maria Machado, Percival Everett, and Ruth Ozeki. She argues that they mobilize self-conscious fiction (or metafiction) to provide an alternative foundation for self-care.
Her co-authored second book, The Honeyfish Collective Presents Fieldnotes on Contemporary Black Poetry, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. The book engages with the work of current poets such as Lauren K. Alleyne, Bettina Judd, Nicky Finney, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Jericho Brown, and Tara Betts. Her co-authors are Katy Didden, Sharon Lynette Jones, Sequoia Maner, and Emily Ruth Rutter.
She has also written op-ed articles appearing in publications such as Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, and The Hill.
Courses she has taught include American Literature, multicultural literature, African American literature, postcolonial literature, Indigenous Literature, and interdisciplinary courses such as a course on intertextuality and identity in Beyonce’s Lemonade. She received her doctorate in American literature from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, NC. You can follow her personal account on Bluesky and her reading account on Storygraph.
For a list of some of her favorite books, click here. For more information on Leah’s teaching and research, click the links in the menu. Contact her here.
