Biography
Misha S. McDaniel (she/they) is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Chicago. Admitted in the Black Studies cohort, she specializes in contemporary Black Atlantic speculative literature, Black Feminist Studies, and narratives of enslaved resistance. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Arts in Englishfrom the University of Chicago. She has presented her work at the 2021 American Comparative Literature Association Conference, the 2023 American Studies Association Conference, the 2024 Caribbean Studies Association Conference, the 2024 International Conference on Women and Slavery in Africa and the Americas at the University of Lisbon, and the 2025 Midwest Modern Language Association Conference. Outside of the classroom, Misha is a fiction and prose-poetry writer, with work published in The Los Angeles Review and literary magazine, Moveable Type (forthcoming). She is also an area steward for graduate workers in the Division of Humanities.
Misha’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Archival Disrespect and Remedy: Refractions of Enslaved Resistance, Rebellion, and Refusal in the Greater Caribbean and U.S. South” situates storytelling as an historical practice that cultivates collective memory and as a resistance practice that pushes against oppressive world orders and the master narrator(s). She studies, reads, and writes speculative literature because she finds the relationship between imagination, possibility, and reality a crucial aspect to understanding the current world and envisioning new future(s)––ones that are able to survive within and beyond climate collapse, beyond white-supremacy, and equitably provide fair societies to all humans, regardless of their ability to labor. In order to think about the future, however, it is just as important to think about the past, specifically the stories we tell and are told by others about times that have passed but are not past like colonization and slavery, as well as instances of both individual and collective refusal that may or may not be mis/documented in the colonial archive.