Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) is Associate Professor of African American Literature in the department of English at UNC Wilmington, where she has taught for eight years. She is also affiliate faculty in the programs of Women’s and Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and Graduate Interdisciplinary Studies. She is a critical literary geographer researching and teaching in African Diasporic, Anglophone Postcolonial, and Hemispheric American studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and decolonial feminist theories.

Education

Ph. D. in English with a concentration in Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Lafayette, Louisiana.
M. A. in English with a concentration in Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Lafayette, Louisiana.
B. A. in English with Honors and a concentration in Rhetoric, University of Alaska, Anchorage.

Specialization in Teaching

Dr. Butler received the Feminist Teaching Award from the UNCW Gender Studies and Research Center for academic year 2018-19. She teaches undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in English, her courses often count for credit toward programs in Women’s and Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and Graduate Interdisciplinary Studies, and sometimes cross-lists courses with the Honors program. She enjoys working with students on Independent Studies, Thesis Projects, and Travel Fellowship Projects, and has mentored students through academic conference presentations and publications. She regularly teaches such undergraduate courses as: Introduction to Literature, Introduction to Literature with a Global Emphasis, Topics in African American Literature, American Literature Survey from Beginning to 1945, American Literature Survey since 1945, Southern American Literature, Studies in the Global South, and Postmodern Literatue. She also regularly teaches such graduate seminars as: Migrations and Home in Contemporary Africana Literature, Black “Southscapes” from “Cartographies of Struggle” to Afrofuturistic Imaginaries, Africana Autobiography: the Personal & Political, the Collective & Communal in Black Life Writing, and Maroon Geographies: Past, Present, and Future.

Research Interests

Dr. Butler researches and writes about place and landscape, rootedness and migration, and home, community, and belonging in the works of Black women and nonbinary writers. Some of her publications include: bell hooks’s Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury Press 2025), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on the Work of Edwidge Danticat (University Press of Mississippi 2022), "“Toward a Homeplace Gardening Praxis: An Ecological Expansion of Belonging in Camille T. Dungy’s Soil" in Black Women's Garden as Art and Practice (Harvard University Press 2025). She also has chapters in the collections Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat (Bloomsbury 2021), Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat (Routledge 2019), and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2019). She has collaborative work in a colloquium section of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies called “Sowing the Seeds: Decolonial Practices and Pedagogies” (September 2020) and an article in College Literature titled “Blogging Race, Blogging Nation: Digital Diaspora as Home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,” (2022).

Professional Service

Dr. Butler is the Co-founding Vice President of the Edwidge Danticat Society. The aim of the Edwidge Danticat Society is to encourage and sponsor the study of the works—literary and activist—of Edwidge Danticat. The society recognizes and supports valuable grassroots and scholarly work-in-progress and strives to create further opportunities for publication of critical, creative, and pedagogical projects addressing Danticat’s oeuvre.

Honors & Awards

SAMLA Studies Book Award—Edited Volume: Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat. 2023.

Mellon Fellowship in Democracy and Landscape Studies. Garden and Landscape Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard Trustee, Washington, D. C. 2023.

Research Reassignment Award, UNCW College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. 2023.

Summer Institute Fellow. National Endowment for the Humanities. “Towards a People’s History of Landscape.” Hosted by Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard Trustee. Washington, D.C. 2022.

Women and Gender Studies Research Fellow, UNCW Gender Studies and Research Center. 2022.