Petal Samuel

Assistant Professor, Department of African, African American,
and Diaspora Studies

Education

M.A., Ph.D, English, Vanderbilt University
B.A., Africana Studies and English, University of Pennsylvania

Research Interests

Petal Samuel is an assistant professor in the Department of African, African American, & Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She specializes in Caribbean women’s writing and anticolonial thought, politics, and aesthetics. Petal’s current project examines how the management of the soundscape—through noise abatement laws and public discourses condemning noise—has served as a crucial avenue of racial and colonial governance in the pre- and post-colonial Caribbean and throughout the Caribbean diaspora. Her work on antiblack soundscape management, legislation, and public discourse can be found in Anthurium, the Journal of West Indian Literature, and The Black Scholar, and her writing on Caribbean women writers and the methodological innovations of Black Studies can be found in Public Books, Black Perspectives, and sx salon.