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 Griot Staff Award for supporting students in the Upperman African American Cultural Center (AY 2018) and the Feminist Teaching Award from the Gender Studies and Research Center (AY 2019). Since then, she has been awarded five internal pedagogy grants to support her innovative pedagogical projects, the most recent being, "FlowILM: “Arts Integrated, Course Embedded Research in Literary Oceanographies" (Co-PI Chelsea Keane, SP 26). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in English, which often count for credit toward programs in Women’s and Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and Graduate Interdisciplinary Studies, and sometimes the Honors program. in Fall 2025, she launched the English Department Student Research Incubator to formalize a cohort of student researchers seeking mentoring around funding and dissemination opportunitiesfor their respective endeavors. She enjoys working with students on Independent Studies, Thesis Projects, and Travel Fellowship Projects, and regularly mentors students through academic conference presentations, co-authors publications, and supports their placement to graduate programs. 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 Literature. 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 studies Black women and Black queer writers' "blueprints to belonging" in diaspora. Her work has been supported by an NEH fellowshop ("Toward A People's History of the Landscape," Washington, D.C., 2022) and a Mellon Foundation Democracy and Landscape Studies Fellowship (hosted by Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard Trustee, 2023). Her monograph in progress is titled Black Feminist Literary Geographies. 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 the collection Black Women's Garden as Art and Practice (Harvard University Press 2027). 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). She is a Freedom Visionary supporting Arts-Based Community of Practice Grantees (Scholars and Practitioners) for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project: Out(sider) Preservation: Commemorating Black Freedom-Seeking, Placemaking, and Migration in American Landscapes.

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. She also serves on the advisory board of the bell hooks Digital Archive Project, for which one of her graduate students is curating the inaugural digital exhibit, "Geographies of the Heart: bell hooks' Kentucky Homeplace." She regularly reviews manuscripts for academic journals and presses, and peer mentors emerging scholars on the hidden curriculum of academia. She serves on the UNCW Graduate Council.

Community Engagement

Dr. Butler and her students have supported the work of the Northside Food Cooperative to bring an end to the decades long food apartheid for residents of the Northside of Wilmingon. She has also served as announcer in the Winter Park Elementary School Spelling Bee in Wilmington, NC .

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.