Rhya Marlene Moffitt is a Neubauer Family Fellow and PhD candidate in the Black Studies cohort in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. She holds Master’s degrees in English from Northeastern University and the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing a dissertation tentatively titled Black Anxiety: Phenomenon, Affect, and Epistemology in the Black Feminist Coming-of-Consciousness Text that explores (magical) realist and life writing from the 19th century to the present. Rhya’s writing has been published in Post45 Contemporaries, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, Jupiter Magazine, MELUS, Black Perspectives, and the E3W Review of Books.
Rhya is also pursuing graduate certificates in Higher Education Administration and College Teaching with a Focus on Writing Pedagogy. She works in art administration at Arts + Public Life as the program coordinator for the Chicago Critic’s Table. She also has experience teaching and designing curriculum at the secondary through undergraduate levels.